> BigBlueButton [...] doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing.

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.

I am the Product Manager for BigBlueButton. We have been building out the project for the past 12 years to focus on one market: online learning.

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

Hi--- I tried BBB for the first time today, --- not deploying my own server, but trying the demo online.

When I click 'start', I'm taken to https://demo2.bigbluebutton.org/html5client/join?sessionToke... which is a 404 Not Found page from nginx.

We use the demo servers (which have a lot of load) to test the latest builds. Try it now.

Any particular reason you don't include Jitsi Meet? (As that tends to be the first one mentioned)

I might be very wrong but I recall a required dependency of jitsi meet not being open source. This was maybe 3 years ago

I'm not familiar with BigBlueButton, but Nextcloud and Element both have a real (for profit?) company backing them, and they have full time employees working there. They're even hiring, with 7 and 8 job openings ATM.

BigBlueButton is largely led by Blindside Networks -- they also oversee the holding of the BigBlueButton trademark, logomark, etc.

Blindside's commercial element is to to consult on educational deployment of the software (which is its intended use).

Considering how much my university(about 3k students) seems to struggle with their BigBlueButton install, I wonder if it's really that hard to scale.

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.

Several of those issues suggest insufficient bandwidth. The others suggest that there should be more than one BBB server, not one gigantic BBB server.

I think parent was saying the more than one BBB servers were upgraded to more than one gigantic BBB servers

It’s a uni so they probably adopted the throw-ideas-at-the-wall-until-it-sticks approach

Yeah, as far as I know they run 5 machines with these specs for the actual conferences now - still encountering these issues and no end of covid in sight for the near future, so I hope that they can figure it out.