Nextcloud is more oriented towards storing files but recently gained tons of social features (video chat, messaging) and has since some time already document editing with LibreOffice online and a build in document editor. There are also tons of other features like LDAP integration, calendars, ...
Matrix/Element is oriented towards messaging between organizations and inside organizations. Element also support video chat and contains an Etherpad integration for document editing.
BigBlueButton is not great for messaging but is excellent for video chatting. It scale a lot better for big rooms than Nextcloud and Matrix because it doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing.
So yeah OpenMeetings is not really a flagship open source software and I'm wondering how it ended up in the front page of HN.
With a few others, I struggled through setting up a "distributed" (i.e. not all on a single machine) BBB deployment early in the pandemic, back when the documentation and community explosion hadn't quite happened. Such a deployment is nonstandard and you're left to your own devices to make it work, albeit with some decent architectural documentation so that you can work out which component needs to run where.
BBB does rely on WebRTC exclusively for its media. The so-called 'HTML5' client is in-browser. There is a Flash-based client that's officially deprecated, and they're slowly stripping out support for it.
There is also some optional Etherpad integration, so that you can collaborate on in-meeting notes that are made available afterwards.
BBB's biggest problem right now is that the Debian packaging, which is the only official way of deploying the software, is not open source. It's also really messy -- some stuff goes into /usr/local, some into /opt, with a fair deal of leftover crud that isn't used any more like the Flash client.
This is an unintentional situation, but the maintainers have deprioritised making the software truly "open source" (IMO) in favour of bugfixes and features.
I don't think this situation meets the GPL it's licensed under, regardless of whether you would qualify this as "open source" or not.
With Covid-19, it has been a pretty intense 2020 for the BigBlueButton project In 2020, we’ve seen some large deployments of BigBlueButton (100's of servers serving thousands of simultaneous meetings). Such deployments do not deploy a single large core machine; rather, they deploy many individual BigBlueButton servers in a pool (see https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite). We don't have BigBlueButton structured where you can split across the components on separate servers: the recommended deployment is each server is a self-contained BigBlueButton installation.
There is a large community of users around the world using BigBlueButton. We, the core developers, have been focused on ensuring that BigBlueButton is solid and scales horizontally. We released 2.2.0 on March 29, 2020 and the current release, as of Nov 11, 2020, is 2.2.29. Those 29 iterations reflect a strong desire by the core development team to respond quickly to the demand and make BigBlueButton the best possible solution for virtual classrooms.
Regarding the packaging, behind the scenes there are a bunch of scripts that I wrote using fpm to build the packages, and it's all non-standard, has grown organically over the years, and needs to be updated.
We had planned to clean up the packaging in 2020 and include it in the core it so others can build and build upon it, but all that got put aside when Covid-19 hit and there was so much demand for the software. Instead, we focused all our development resources on improving the system for end users (security, stability, usability, and features).
We are looking forward to providing standard Debian packaging scripts for BigBlueButton in 2021, alongside making continuous improvements to BigBlueButton.
Our goal remains to make BigBlueButton the best virtual classroom system for online learning.
Regards,... Fred
When I click 'start', I'm taken to https://demo2.bigbluebutton.org/html5client/join?sessionToke... which is a 404 Not Found page from nginx.
Blindside's commercial element is to to consult on educational deployment of the software (which is its intended use).
Voice, video drop out all the time, loading takes ages, recordings only process 50% of the time - and they say that they upgraded the machine it runs on three times with 80 cores and 500GB RAM. Especially when the lecturer insists on using a document camera, but the bitrate of the video is so small that you can't make out anything.
Really not that pleasant, especially in a situation where you need to depend on it for every event.
It’s a uni so they probably adopted the throw-ideas-at-the-wall-until-it-sticks approach
> Existing offerings are: Graphics2D from AWT, GraphicsContext from JavaFX. They are good, but underwhelming.
> Enter Skia. Skia has a proven track record of industrial-scale project relying on it for all things graphics: Google Chrome, Android, Flutter, Firefox Canvas, Xamarin, LibreOffice.
I also agree that Java attracts a certain kind of developer.
This, 100%. UX doesn't respect development because devs tend not to care about UX. Development doesn't respect UX because UXers tend not to care about development.
IMHO, devs tend to assume everyone is a programmer. And many people are very much not.
Which is why even graphical OSS tends to look and work like... git.
Here is a thought: do you want committed UX people working on open source? PAY THEM!
If every developer set aside a budget of 5-10% they spend on proprietary services to contribute to the funding of open source projects, there would be enough to attract hordes of UX professionals.
It amazes me how much of a premium people for, e.g, Apple products yet can not plan to spare 5-10 bucks a month to support R&D of open source.
If I'm correct to suspect that this train of thought might exist (and not only keeping UI designers away, but all sorts of related professions like product managers, marketing, etc.) then maybe the whole notion of "[product] is open source, contribute to the source code or issue queue" needs to be rebranded as "[product] is an open collective work, contribute in any possible way" with a collaborationware workflow that doesn't consider changing the source and filing issues (bugs, feature requests) to be the only first class citizens.
Many projects do have communities with robust organization of leadership, management, branding, etc. but with real or perceived barriers to entry that don't give the same sense of openness and "everyone can contribute to this well-oiled contribution intake machine" in non-code aspects akin to what developers enjoy.
Companies spend a lot of money on tools like Zoom. If instead they donated a couple of man-days to projects like OpenMeetings or Jitsi, these tools would be in much better shape and we'd all have free conferencing software.
And even if I was a UI/UX person, I think this is a deeper problem than a patch could solve.
The whole things looks like as if every developer that worked on it just decided to randomly place a button for their feature somewhere. Well... probably that's what happened.
Unfortunately, until most OSS looks like this, it'll be very hard for them to gain ground over the commercial alternatives.