
BigBlueButton: An open source web conferencing system - angristan
https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton
======
Faaak
We use this product on our company of ~150 during the COVID work-at-home
thingy.

It's quite great ! It supports audio and video and is quite reactive for us.

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mkl
Cool. I have a few questions:

How many people can you have in sessions simultaneously?

Do you use the shared whiteboard? What's it like for people without a stylus?

Any idea why it requires such an ancient version of Ubuntu (16.04)?

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pretendgeneer
That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years
old. So it may just not have been properly updated.

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codefined
How does this compare to something like 'Jitsi Meet'?

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giomasce
It is more oriented to teaching, so it's more classroom style: there is a main
presenter and many listeners, it had a whiteboard, things like these. It's
quite feature-packed, while Jitsi is maybe more minimal.

~~~
o-__-o
Jitsi is like zoom, big blue conference is like webex/gotomeeting

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f00_
Best open-source, self-hosted solution to this problem. There is a mattermost
plugin.

Very easy install, requires a 10 - 15$ vps instance.

Would like to see if anyone uses this on a large scale

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jdc
Looks like they recommend 500gb storage space for production.. where are
running yours?

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wolrah
This seems interesting, but the fact that the officially supported distro is
still Ubuntu 16.04 is alarming. There is no good excuse for actively developed
software to require an outdated operating system.

I get that it's a LTS platform, but so is 18.04. 16.04 only has ~1 year of
support left, so deploying infrastructure on it now is idiotic.

At this point they should at least be recommending 18.04 and should be testing
on betas of 20.04 while considering compatibility issues to be high priority.

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capableweb
Seems like a set of ~8 or something core contributors working on this open
source project. You talk about it like it's a professional product. Ubuntu
16.04 is still everywhere and I'm sure they have their reasons for not having
time to deploy on multiple platforms / architectures / beta lines in order to
test changes.

I think you best shot at fixing this problem that has "no good excuse" and
using it would be "idiotic" would be to contribute yourself. The least you can
do is open a thoughtful issue asking the same things you asked here, but in a
way better tone. Even better would be to contribute code but eh, Java.

Edit: another comment in this thread: "That readme is 17months old. and the
reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been
properly updated."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533)

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mekster
"If you don't like it, fix it yourself" approach doesn't really work for many
just because it's open source.

Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a
professional product?

If the recommended distro is from 4 years ago, people will feel if it's being
abandoned and just go look elsewhere.

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capableweb
> Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a
> professional product?

It doesn't, there are plenty of open source professional products. This
doesn't seem to be one of them though, as I would expect a company with for-
profit motives behind it if that's the case. This seems to be a project that
is merely supported by a company to support the development, which is also
fine.

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nickthegreek
Its been awhile since I used BBB, but I found issues with it when there were
over ~20 participants. Anyone know how well BBB scales these days?

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jtbayly
Well... the website won't load for me right now, so it's not promising. :|

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andrewkdinh
The website loads, it’s just extremely slow to do so

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lxe
Just tried their demo -- looks full-featured and solid overall! Setup
documentation seems pretty detailed.

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giomasce
That's right. Although I tried to setup self hosted both BBB and Jitsi Meet,
and was not rally satisfied. Both had quite some problems with audio and video
streams, which either didn't start or froze later. I think that both software
are better than I could setup, because I've seen them working pretty good, but
I'm not sure what is the secret ingredient.

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o-__-o
The secret sauce in jitsi is NAT traversal so make sure you don’t have an
overzealous firewall on the hosting server. Second it relies on google STUN
servers, changing to different servers or using ips instead of dns may help
fix problems on the client end.

Jitsi is amazing when setup properly (I have some deploy scripts somewhere out
there, Jitsi is not truely open source as it seems)

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giomasce
Do you have some link to documentation explaining how to setup/debug this kind
of things? I tried to deploy Jitsi Meet on a EC2 instance with all access
permitted, but it still had quite a few problems. Did not try to tinker with
STUN, though.

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protomyth
Did anyone find a license file? The source code doesn't even have a copyright
header.

~~~
capableweb
package.json for the frontend mentions LGPL-3.0, good enough?

[https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1...](https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1850694029c7a8516261e215a2c40c9f9/bigbluebutton-
html5/package.json#L4)

