Notes from an online free-software conference [LWN.net]

Notes from an online free-software conference

Posted Sep 5, 2020 13:44 UTC (Sat) by karim (subscriber, #114)
Parent article: Notes from an online free-software conference

Thanks for writing this down. It's pretty unique to see this level of dedication to doing something that's usually done using almost 100% proprietary packages using 100% open source packages. Hats off to the LPC committee.

Some nibbling at the edges:
- Youtube is NOT open source. I don't disagree with its use, and I wouldn't have advised trying to use an alternative open source solution. I haven't looked, and maybe those exist, but I've not come across anyone running/hosting an OSS Youtube. Part of the problem there is that even if we did have an OSS version, there's still the cost of hosting and bandwidth and those would likely be non-negligible for anything popular enough. Hence Youtube is probably the right choice.

- Having been doing remote training for 7+ years now, I initially started off by using mostly proprietary packages/solutions. When possible, I've replaced what I could with open source packages. I was therefore quite interested to see LPC's BBB efforts, especially as they would be tested by dozens of speakers and an even larger set of participants. I have to admit, though, that its scalability issues seem to preclude moving to it for the type of work I do. This specific passage is most of interest: "Things only got bumpy during the "show off your beer" session held after the official close of the event, when 20 or more attendees had their cameras on at the same time; BigBlueButton just does not work well under that sort of load." I routinely have >20 people with live cameras on at all times. BBB is therefore still not an option for me for now.

Thanks again for sharing.

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Notes from an online free-software conference

Posted Sep 5, 2020 15:29 UTC (Sat) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link]

Agreed that it's a great writeup. I don't think having a completely optional YouTube stream detracts much from the “100% free software” goal—but it isn't actually that hard to distribute live streams yourself these days, and the cloud bandwidth costs are rarely prohibitive if you can already afford (or get sponsored, more likely) 17 virtual machines with 32 cores each. :-) But you do get a very popular ecosystem for after-the-fact viewing.

Notes from an online free-software conference

Posted Sep 9, 2020 8:51 UTC (Wed) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]

I haven't used it myself, but people on Mastodon seem quite excited about PeerTube as a free, decentralised alternative to YouTube. It doesn't do live streaming yet, but it's on the roadmap.