Episode: 3097
Title: HPR3097: Linux Inlaws S01E07 The Big Blue Button
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3097/hpr3097.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:43:56

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3, 1997 for Tuesday 16 June 2020. Today's show is entitled
Season 1 Episode 7, The Big Blue Button
and is part of the series Linux in Laws. It is hosted by Monochromech
and is about 65 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
The Lads talk to Fred Dixon, Product Manager for Big Blue Button.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com
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This is Linux in Laws. A podcast on topics around free and open source software,
any associated contraband, communism, the revolution in general, and whatever else,
fans is critical. Please note that this and other episodes may contain strong language,
offensive humor, and other certainly not politically correct language.
You have been warned. Our parents insisted on this disclaimer.
Happy Mom? That's the content is not suitable for consumption in the workplace,
especially when played back on a speaker in an open plan office or similar environments.
Any miners under the age of 35, or any pets including fluffy little killer bunnies,
you trusted guide dog unless on speed, and Q to T-Rexes or other associated dinosaurs.
Season 1, episode 7. The one with a big blue button.
Good morning Mark. How are you?
I'm well, how are you?
Can't complain. You can always complain.
You can only give them seconds half past nine on a lovely Sunday.
Sorry, Sunday morning though, it's not Sunday.
Yes, why is it so early again, Chris?
I don't know. Some people suggested that we should do an early morning slot too.
It's probably because we enjoyed the last early episodes so much.
Maybe I don't know.
Someone, what's happening?
Yeah, so what's happening? Well, obviously this is our episode on a big blue button.
Yeah, we're going to do an interview later on with one of the project leads.
But first of all, some news.
The news.
The news, yes Mark, what's news?
Okay, so my news of the week, well news or not news or whatever you want to call it since the details of this are a little bit lacking is the fact that
it has been hacked and many accounts have been found as well as some critical details.
So this is yet another example of a corporation not implementing their security very well.
Obviously BA was the previous example of this airline, another airline which did this but
on the subject recently running Firefox again after finding Google has some redrawing issues.
It comes up with this standard Firefox monitor as soon as you fire up Firefox for the first time, which is quite a handy feature I find to warn you if you go to
a certain website that I have been hacked in the past and details have been compromised.
Coming back to the to the easy chat for each Martin, what you're going to do with the cash when you have sold the 9 million data sets.
Well, I just think that you read this correctly because it was very much pointed at our Chinese colleagues.
I am not from Chinese or anything.
Wait, you see, this is basically where something called Virtual Private Networks come in handy, right?
Indeed, indeed. On the subject of our friends from the East, similar to when you're running your own servers,
because they seem to be quite active in the breaking into markets as you notice when you're running your own servers.
Just because you come from a Chinese IP that doesn't just mean that you are in China, you know.
I see, so you're behind the Chinese IP.
Maybe these Chinese IPs are just handy or cheap or abundant, I don't know.
However, they're also quite active in, I mean, they are known to have quite a little compute power in China, right?
They do. In addition to IP addresses, fair enough.
Martin, you've never failed to surprise me.
Well, do they actually have many IP addresses for the size of the country?
I think a lot of people are living there, yes.
Do they have a larger range of signs? Do we notice?
I do not know.
Something we missed. Anyway, waiting for some more detail on this easy jet hack,
because it's just saying, oh, it was highly sophisticated, it's not very useful for the tech community amongst us.
I don't know what actually happened.
Yeah, I find it quite astonishing that these things can happen in 2020 with security experts freely available.
One of them being a German colleague of mine.
It will be a free hack.
Well, I'm always tempted to ask Martin to review more details about the hack,
but given the fact that this is a public podcast, he might be a little bit on the side.
What is this?
It's too many.
It could make a lot more moving around using the dark side.
More than likely.
In other shocking news.
I just found out what the next Ubuntu version will be called.
Sorry, not 21, but rather 2010, which is the autumn release.
And in contrast to what Mark will tell you, it's actually called Martin Wimpress Vanity Edition.
It will be called Martin Wimpress Vanity Edition.
And why is this shocking?
Because in the past, just, I think, what's what I'm looking for?
For animal, exactly animal species.
In addition to some funny adjectives, is that what I'm looking for?
Or traits have been the names of Ubuntu editions.
For example, the last LTS is the 2004 and was called.
It was called Foster from a completely mistaken.
And the previous one was E1.
E1 something.
Yes.
Irmite?
Yes.
Irmite.
Irmite.
Yes.
Sorry.
But Canonica decided to break with that rule.
And now the next edition will be called Martin Wimpress Vanity Edition.
So Martin Wimpress.
How much do you pay people to podcast?
If you're listening, this is your edition.
Does he not know this of it?
And how much do you pay them to upset me?
OK.
OK.
It's turning more light on this.
Of course, this was a lame joke or pun or whatever.
Actually, the next one will be called Groovy Guru Ruddard.
But why am I even mentioning this, Martin Wimpress, if you're listening?
You did a great stunt on Ubuntu podcast on Ork or on the Ubuntu podcast rather.
Because Martin apparently did.
He got in touch with Martin Schott and Mark Schott award and suggested Groovy Guru Ruddard.
And never.
And they had a laugh.
They had a way of a time, rather.
On the last Ubuntu podcast, basically, Slack Martin offered this.
So Martin, this is another opportunity to slack you.
We are looking forward to Martin Wimpress Vanity Edition appearing
from when on September 21st or something.
What other news are there?
In other news, yes, where were we?
OK, on a personal news.
Yeah, you wanted to talk about this breach.
And what you're going to do with the cashmon?
Well, maybe we covered that already.
Let's not go there.
But maybe perhaps make some improvements to Guru on the Ubuntu.
That'd be a good investment.
By the way, before I forget, fun fact, dealers.
You can actually change.
For those of you who are pretty annoyed with the focal fossa wallpaper.
And when you log into...
You want to be annoyed with the shell or something like this.
You can change this.
In contrast, pro tip now.
In contrast to the 1910 one.
You don't have to change an ASCII file as an cascading star cheat.
It's now wrapped into something called the G variant database.
Which you have to change.
There is actually a hack on GitHub.
Allowing you to do this via the ETC alternative system.
Links will be in the show notes.
The way it works essentially is you replace the original G variant database
with something that you have under your control.
And you're going to pick this up.
And then you can modify the wallpaper.
You can also get rid of the Ubuntu logo on the login screen if you choose to do so.
By simply making the corresponding PNG file that has this name in it.
Zero bytes.
If you remove it, the GDM will be pretty annoyed.
But if you just make it...
If you shrink it to zero bytes, basically the file will be open.
GDM will be happy.
But the logo won't be displayed.
Again, details on the show notes.
Couldn't resist there.
Mark, if you're listening courtesy of Linux and Lars.
One of our many listeners.
Yes, of course.
Of course he's listening.
Why would he be listening?
Okay.
Any other news?
Any other news?
Yes.
Well, it depends.
You wanted to talk about this data breach.
And what you're going to do with the cache selling the records now?
Sorry, I think we covered that already.
Anyway.
There was an age related DSTS coming up.
There's even more pull for it.
Martin still has to read, right?
There's still listeners, so stay put.
Yes.
We must do feedback at some stage.
But we can do that after the interview.
It's also going to live today, isn't it?
Well, we're going to put this on the Hacker Public Radio.
No, no, no, I'm importing the previous one.
Is it today?
Of course.
Oh, it's tomorrow.
Sorry.
Maybe tomorrow, I don't know.
Yeah, we're recording this on the 20th of May.
But you probably won't listen to this before early June on Hacker Public Radio.
Subject to availability of slots on this beloved website.
I can't hear you.
Yes, Hacker Public Radio.
Do you know what it's actually named after?
A website dedicated to unedited podcasts on anything Hacker related?
Yes, I know, but did you know that there is actually a Hacker radio as a device?
I don't know what this is.
But I wouldn't know the technical details.
Let's ask the Hacker among us.
Martin, what is this Hacker radio thing?
So before the internet, music and speech was transmitted, either by waves in the atmosphere,
or by telephone lines, or by physical devices, like record and so on.
Anyway, that was the point of time when Martin was around 20 years of age.
Give or take.
So, yes.
So radio being one of these devices that has a accepting capacity for transmitting these wavelengths.
Anyway, so being very popular with young people, in those days, and not having any digital media available, let alone transport,
there were a lot of companies making physical devices to receive these wavelengths.
So, whether it's for television or radio waves, not radio waves, but you know what I mean.
And Hacker was one of these companies who built radios.
So, interesting.
And if you put this in your favorite search engine, you will find some examples.
Or you, I can show you one in my garden.
You have a Hacker radio in your garden?
Yes.
Well, not in the garden garden and in the...
Does that help with breaching airline websites?
Well, this is the thing, you see.
So many people are using the internet, that's going back to...
I see.
Like that.
Back to analog, as much as I was saying.
Full disclosure, Martin is not associated with the EasyJet hack at any time.
It's just me making fun of Martin.
British police, don't go after him, please.
That was just a joke.
I think it's working, keep going.
Excellent.
And there was something I wanted to talk to you about.
Not again.
Yes, and video.
Yes, and video.
And video, yes.
And video.
I have a comment before you start.
Yeah.
And video, you need to make parts of the stuff.
Yeah, please go ahead.
Yes.
Training...
Well, it doesn't really matter what you're training.
It's still taking hours rather than seconds.
And, you know, we are in 2020 now.
I expect better from you.
So, cracking on some better hardware, please.
Anyway, carry on.
Okay.
Martin had some issues with the browser recently, where he blamed Chrome
for not being able to display certain websites.
Maybe Martin, you can share more details.
No, it's more...
Not so much, and not being able to display certain websites.
When you have it open for a while and maximise it,
it changes to other things on...
Other applications even too.
It just becomes a mess, and you need to basically resize it
or redraw it.
At least stuff behind, right?
It's not refreshing itself very well.
Martin, of course, immediately saw Chrome as the culprit
in this context.
Whereas, I tried to make fun of him by saying,
look, this may be an Nvidia problem.
Well, because as we all know, Martin is running this,
unless he went to a box that has some sort of high-end GTX,
what is it?
2070?
Incorporated, right?
If he's still not very impressive, but anyway.
Yeah, so...
I mean, like yourself.
How many browsers do you run, Chris?
I run many browsers.
Well, Chrome has displayed this about two.
Two?
Okay.
Yeah.
Now the truth, the listeners,
maybe in the middle, in terms of...
If you take a close look of how Chrome is architected,
and this is basically what you see across operating systems,
it goes for WindowsMark, as well as Linux.
You'll see that actually Chrome does a lot of things directly
on the GPU.
There's something for, for example, on MacOS called the Chrome,
I think, GPU renderer, or whatever the process is called.
So, if you're encountering similar issues,
take a look at...
Ultimately, I would, of course, recommend taking a look at the Chrome
source code, but give them the fact that this is quite a few
megabytes in size.
You may be better off using your search engine,
because Chrome has a lot of document it, as well as
undocumented switches.
Some of them being able to control the GPU directly.
If I have the time, you'll find more details in the show notes,
because Martin brought this up in kind of short notice.
I didn't have the time to research this properly,
but let me do some digging.
You just may be able to fix this using the command line as such.
So, stay tuned.
If you have an update and later episodes,
Martin has already decided to delete Chrome from his heart drive.
It's...
I can't say that.
No.
Well, when the likes of Firefox and Opera can function
without these issues, then why bother right?
So, Chrome, you haven't done a very good job.
Well, I mean, on the upside, Chrome is one of the fastest browsers I know.
And that, of course, directly relates to rendering performance.
Does anybody actually pinch more?
There are a couple of websites dedicated to this.
You'll find details in the show notes.
So, okay.
I think now is the time to bring on our guest.
Yes.
And let's do the feedback after the interview.
First of all, great to have you on the show, Fred.
Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners
for those few who don't know you never mind the Big Blue Button project yet?
All right.
So, my name is Fred Dixon.
I am the product manager for Big Blue Button,
which is an open source web conferencing system for online learning.
I have been managing the project for over 10 years.
And I am the one responsible for the releases.
So, if you have good things to say about the product,
I'll pass it on to the developers.
If you have things you want to improve, you can tell me.
Can you share a little bit about your personal project
and how you got into computer first place?
So, let me...
I'm a computer scientist by trade.
And where I discovered the Big Blue Button was at Carlton University here in Auto Ontario.
So, in an academic environment,
it was a project that had been built by a student, a master student,
at the Technology Innovation and Management Program at Carlton University in Auto Ontario, Canada.
And so, they had built a system, all in open source components,
and they were using it to teach online.
And I was networking around the university looking for students that I could mentor,
because I had gotten a lot of mentorship really on in my career.
Came across this project and thought,
there's something here.
Like, open source is a really powerful way to disseminate a product.
And then the business model is you can provide services and support,
but you have to solve a problem first.
And if you do that, and lots of people start using it,
then you create a market where you can offer additional value into it.
Like, pick any open source software, like WordPress or others, right?
It's a very, very well-practiced business model.
And I thought that for virtual classrooms,
this business model would work well,
because academia is usually fairly open to trying open source.
I mean, even back then, 10 years ago, was even more so.
So, fast forward today, as an open source project,
we, thanks to the community, were localized into,
I used to say, 25 languages, but I'm probably,
it's around 35 now.
Wow.
It's used all over the world.
Every corner, we have tens of thousands of downloads a week.
A million plus visitors on our website.
The usage of it on our mailing list has just the messages of Skyrocketed.
Like, I wake up every morning,
and there are a hundred messages on our development mailing list.
I have a feeling this is what Linus must have felt like in the early days.
Like, I can't read them all anymore.
Like, you know.
Amazing.
Yeah, that sounds like,
wow, these times, obviously, you're going to be super busy aren't you?
So, thank you again for joining us on the show.
So, it sounds like when you just came across it,
rather than being involved with the guy who actually started to project themselves,
is that correct?
Yeah, so Richard Alum, who's the CTO,
had been working out for a year.
And in 2007, I kind of met him and we really hit it off.
And I said, OK, I think there's something here.
And at the time, I was working at another company.
So, I started a number of companies myself.
And I said, OK, let's, I'm going to get two years into this.
I'm going to give two years and towards this project to see if we can get it going as an open source project,
provide some hosting, professional services around it,
and focus on one market, which is online learning.
And I have to say, like,
big blue button is used around the world in many different contexts.
If you have a core product,
which is providing audio, video, slides, chat, screen share,
you know, all, you know,
to play back accessibility,
all the core things you expect in any web conferencing system,
commercial or not,
you know, when you focus on a market,
you build on that core,
and then you extend your features towards a target market.
So, in big blue button, we build things like share notes,
most user whiteboard,
breakout rooms, breakout rooms took us a while.
But these are all things that when you want to, you know,
challenge people to learn, right?
Teachers do not want to stare at a screen and talk into the void.
They want students responding to polls, chat, emoji, breakout rooms, you know,
raising their hands.
They want engagement.
So, you know,
if you think of a video conferencing system where, you know,
12 webcams come up and talk to each other,
that's okay.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But if you look at it from a pedagogic point of view,
there are more things that could be done.
So, we decided to focus on building out features on top of a strong core
that would be attractive to an educational use case scenario.
Yeah, I can see the benefits.
There's obviously, you know,
myself and Chris were regularly doing these kind of sessions for customers
with a commercial product,
but you don't have the engagement as well as doing these kind of things in person.
So, it's not your, like,
the button is actually more suited to these kind of activities.
And, yeah, social education is not really its main use case,
I would say.
Presumably, you're finding out with the downloads and the request is that people
are using it for your, you know,
online meetings, user groups, there's kind of things.
In all cases, like they're finding that if they're inside of a corporation
and they want to set up their own in it,
like behind the firewall conferencing system,
Big Blue Button provides them an option to do that.
If you are doing like one-to-one coaching,
you know, and you want to just have a purpose-built application for that,
Big Blue Button will allow you to do that.
If you want to talk, you know, give online classes,
that's the primary focus for Big Blue Button.
I can share with you, like,
one of the largest deployments of Big Blue Button is actually the US Department of Defense.
So, they have been running it at scale for over five years now,
excuse me.
And they call it Defense Information Systems Agency.
The Defense Information Systems Agency,
I call it DCS, Distributed Collaborative Systems.
They adopted it.
It's not going to sound unsurprising.
They adopted it because it was open source.
They could scan every line of code.
They had full access to everything.
And they used it to build an internal system that made available to people in military.
So, there's an example of a non-educational use of the product,
but the core capabilities of Big Blue Button enables them to do it.
An interesting perspective there.
I'm just wondering, I reckon since this whole pandemic thing broke out globally,
your download figures must have skyrocketed.
Do you have any indication of what the increase is?
Since more and more people are working from home these days,
and companies are just going for conference and solutions,
beyond the commercial competition out there,
like the teams of the world, like the zooms of the world, and so forth.
So, I haven't checked the numbers recently,
but a few weeks ago, there were tens of thousands of download every week.
I'm just counting the unique IP addresses on the download server, the package server.
So, it is far more than it was before.
And this is all correlated with the Twitter traffic,
the traffic on our website, the traffic on the mailing list,
in terms of the developer mailing list.
So, Big Blue Button has had a huge deployment.
And I will share with you,
there's a bunch of components that have been released over the years
that build kind of more of a complete solution.
So, a lot of cases, there are four things that people will leverage.
Let's say they're using Moodle.
There's a Moodle plugin that's available.
There are currently 1400 plugins available on the Moodle database.
They ranked the top 20 by popularity, like downloads in the last 12 months.
The Big Blue Button plugin ranks at number three.
It's going to take over the number two spot in probably a couple more weeks.
So, a huge number of people using Moodle.
There's Big Blue Button itself, which is open source.
And then there's two other components that people are leveraging.
One is, if you don't have Moodle,
you still want kind of a simple front end that lets you log in, create a room,
invite people to the room,
and then after meetings done, see the recordings and manage the recordings.
So, we built a front end called Green Light.
The idea is like,
Green Light is giving you a very simple front end that you could log in with OAuths.
If you're Office 365 or Google Apps, or you create your own accounts,
it's a Ruby and Rails application.
I see.
The other open source component is something called Scale Light.
And so, two months ago,
we worked with CTO Liverpool University in China.
And they were using Moodle and COVID-19 is struck.
So, they needed to be able to host Big Blue Button at Scale.
And what we did was we built out a load balancer for them.
So, they could take a pool of 15 Big Blue Button servers.
And to Moodle, make it look like a single Big Blue Button server.
Nice.
Okay.
So, with Green Light as a front end,
Scale Light to manage a pool of Big Blue Button servers,
and make it look to, let's say, Green Light or Moodle as a single server.
And ability to have like a pool of Big Blue Button servers in the back end.
All the pieces are there.
That if a school or university organization wants to run Big Blue Button at Scale,
they can do it.
And so, I was chatting with folks early this week.
This is in Germany.
They had set up Big Blue Button at Scale with over 600 servers using these open source components.
And they did not have to talk to us.
They basically went to the docs, joined our mailing list.
And that was fantastic.
Because that was our goal.
Every student in the world should have access to a high-quality online learning experience.
We, as an open source project, create tools to enable instructors to engage the remote students.
We have created the most popular web conferencing system for online learning, which is Big Blue Button.
Nice.
Okay.
Just because you just mentioned Germany.
Fun fact, I'm German by birth.
And I see a particular uptake here in this country.
For example, I'm helping to organize Frostcon, which is one of the biggest community events in any given year in Germany.
And this year, unfortunately, we had to decide to move this to virtual.
So we're using a Big Blue Button instance, not only for hosting the conference in August, but also for all of the prep work.
So as a matter of fact, tonight, we have the next octave meeting using a Big Blue Button instance.
Do you see a particular uptake in Germany now that you mentioned that?
Or is it just kind of across Europe, across the world?
Are there any other countries, specific countries where you see a particular strong uptake?
So let's talk about Germany for a moment.
Definitely we see a strong uptake.
I mean, you can look at the Twitter feeds.
If you look at just searching Twitter for any tweet that has the word Big Blue Button.
I have to learn German because half of them are in German now.
I mean, Twitter will translate it for me.
Okay.
There is a tremendous amount.
And part of this is comes back to data privacy.
So like we as a Canadian company, we don't have any legal status in Germany.
There's no German arm of us.
So, but as an open source project, the door is the opportunity is there for German based organizations.
Like the one I mentioned earlier that set up over 600 servers to fully leverage Big Blue Button.
So because it's open source and because you have access to all the code.
And because the tools are there to host it at scale, we see very large scale deployments now occurring and a lot of them are occurring in Germany.
And we again think this is fantastic because we're getting a ton of feedback on the product and ways that we can improve it.
And let me just say up front, right?
Your listener may be asking well, is Fred going to say Big Blue Button is a secure system now?
Or does it fully support GDPR, you know, and pick any other criteria?
And as a manager of open source projects or the maintainer, I would say like if any one of the world tells you their system is secure, they are lying to you because it's just levels of security.
And we try very hard to make it secure.
And there's information on our website and all the things we do in terms of the crypto that the information going back and forth and so on.
In terms of support for the General Data Rights Protection Act, we have things which we do in terms of like you can turn off recordings.
There's more things that we can do and our community has been actually helping us put together some documentation.
If you go to the docs.biglubut.org and there's a document there for privacy.
And this is a, this is an evolving document in terms of okay, you want to support GDPR or privacy.
Here are the things that Big Blue Button collects and here is the way to reduce that.
And this is, this is awesome because we are getting other people to contribute their skills and expertise like we're developers.
But we, when you work with the community, things just happen so much faster.
So a lot of things is happening when your, you know, readers listen to this or the listeners listen to it.
You know, it'll probably be further along than it was, you know, at the point of time we recorded it.
But with regards to Germany, yes, a huge increase partly because I think we do a pretty good job of, you know, the conferencing part, especially for online learning.
It is fully open source. The pieces are there to run it at scale.
There is active work in terms of making sure that we do the best possible support for GDPR.
And there's a community of people around the world who have been working with Big Blue Button for many years.
We all share a commonwealth of every improvement to Big Blue Button has a multiple effect now that everybody using it gets to benefit from it.
So whether you're an educational institution, whether you're not for profit or commercial company.
If you're building on Big Blue Button, the opportunity is there to fully leverage it and engage with the community and contribute back.
Excellent. Yeah, that was one of my questions is kind of, you know, how is your project organized and do you get more collaboration from external parties that you didn't have before?
It looks like you have a set of core developers, right? That seems to look after the project that you get more contributions nowadays.
Yes, we do, we have guidelines we wrote up years ago in terms of like how to send us pull requests, how to contribute, how to interact.
And we more and more now, we get people in our community sending us pull requests to improve parts of the product.
And that's amazing because we are, we still, we care, tremendous amount of what the usability of the product, making sure that it's easy for instructors and students to get in.
The stability of the product, all these things around it.
And now when other people contribute, that's just amazing because now we are, we're, we can see the product accelerating faster and faster and things that we normally would have to do ourselves.
If other people can take a shot at it, we can review it. It's less work for us. They have a vested interest in it.
And the project just cause just.
Yeah, that's the whole idea behind it.
So, so I mean, do you have a commercial company as well that looks after, for example, commercial versions of blue button, like many open source projects that are usually the enterprise version of speakers.
I mean, they can imagine that you're, you know, compared to people that use teams or zoom or whatever they might want to go with, proprietary or supported versions of a piece of software.
Right. And so there are a number of companies that are in the big blue button ecosystem.
You'll find a listed at biglubutton.org. I work at one of them as well.
And they're all providing hosting for big blue button to various parts of the world.
That list was probably going to grow over time. But yes, the, you know, I studied when I, when I tried, when I decided to go for the open source business model with myself, my co founder.
I looked a lot at why other open source projects fail and they failed because they don't make money.
So we have tried very hard to offer, you know, hosting and support and that model has worked for us over the years and has worked for many other companies involved in the big blue button ecosystem.
So there are options for commercial support that you can find at biglubutton.org. Just click on commercial support and companies are there.
So if another interesting question comes up is people ask, where can I donate money to the project?
We're very clear on this in our documentation. We do not accept donations.
I think it's a silly way to run an open source project because it implies that you're working for charity.
If you are a commercial organization, you know, government entity and you want to make use of big blue button and you want to be supporting the project, go to one of the companies that provides commercial support and buy a support contract from them or buy some hosting.
Much of that revenue goes right back into improving the product. The company makes revenue. You get support or hosting.
The resources available to companies grow because they're making more revenue. I get all works out. So we, we really believe strongly in the onto the social benefit of what we're doing and it's just so pleasing to see people to change shots.
I'm in South Africa and we set up big blue button and now we can teach students and remote villages like, oh my God, that makes us all feel so good.
And we also believe in the entrepreneurial opportunities of taking something that we built, making it available in open source license and then going back to the community and saying, hey, if you want hosting, we can do this for you.
Like you don't, you have the option of sending it up yourself at scale, but for many organizations, they would rather have someone else do that for them. And that's where the companies can help out.
Of course, yeah, makes sense. And so how do you see the, I mean, obviously it's exciting in a moment. So how is he going forward the future of the project to speak.
So there is, so the way I think of it is this, there are commercial options out there.
And there is nothing that a commercial option is doing that we can't eventually get to as a project.
So I see the capabilities of big blue button, the core capabilities strengthening over time, terms of scalability in other areas.
And I also see as deepening our value proposition for the educational market.
Because I'm not trying to outbeat the competitors at their own game. That's a kind of a fools errand.
I've learned enough from, you know, on tourism that you focus on a market, provide really good value for that market, and then you grow from that market.
And to be honest, the educational market is huge, like with COVID-19.
It is, it is way beyond what any one company could do.
So when you, when I see instances of big blue button setting up that are running 600 servers to support like large scale educational needs, I think that's it.
That's exactly what we were trying to do.
So I see that every time we improve each, with each iteration, with each, with each improvement, our value proposition for online learning gets stronger and stronger.
And again, that's, that's the winning strategy for my experience is to focus on a market and, you know, add value.
And in terms of, you know, with the educational market, there, there are some, every university college has a learning management system.
Like it's Moodle or it's Canvas or it's Gen Zabar or it's School of G, you know, or it's Blackboard or it's D-12, like there's, and there's like just dozens and dozens of others around the world.
Moodle is the dominant one worldwide, not so much in North America.
So we have focused a lot of engineering resources into making sure the integrations with the learning management systems are deep.
And it's a very easy for an instructor and students to get together and click, you know, one link and then you're into a virtual class.
You collaborate, you go back, you leave, and then the LMS, the recording there is a visible for, you know, some short time afterwards.
And that ease of use, again, reflects how much we're focusing on that market.
So, you know, ease of integration, engagement, and over time, analytics, so that we can get back into, like, Moodle is an example, like we're close to an updated feature, which is telling you, which will be able to tell the instructor with activity completion.
You know, they could mark an activity as being, okay, Marcus activity is being completed, like telling Moodle, okay, Moodle, Marcus has completed when the students have spent more than two hours in an online class.
Right, so you have a couple classes, the time is going back into Moodle, and at some point the activity threshold is reached, and then Moodle says, okay, these students have completed this activity, like check.
And so, that you get there when you really focus on and get an integration, and we do a lot of that.
Okay, good strategy, sorry Chris.
Sorry, no, interesting perspective indeed.
Switching gears a little bit, I noticed that the software is licensed on the lesser GPL.
Can you explain a little bit about the background for that decision and the implications on contributors?
Right, so the LGPL version three was a good enough license when we started the project 10 years ago.
And like we're, you know, we could change it because we have contribute agreements signed for all the code that's been committed to the project.
So the big blue button ink, the legal entity owns the code and has agreements with all the contributors, myself and everyone else.
So we do have the option, the big blue button ink, which is a not-per-profit legal entity incorporating a province Ontario.
It, you know, the license could be changed if we want.
So we didn't, we wanted something that was very permissive, and LGPL was as good.
There may be a world where we get to where it's the Apache public license, which allows you even more freedom.
The only place that this really kicks in is LGPL.
This requirement is that you must be able, if you're linked in, it's basically the lesser GPL.
If you get linked in to a product through the LGPL, that product must be able to run standalone without.
Otherwise, it's not really a component. It's, it's like the product.
So the only part, the LGPL is a little tricky is if you're one of the parts, is if you're going to build mobile apps, because the mobile apps are basically built in.
And then you, it's really hard to, to meet all the criteria, the LGPL, because of the way the vendors, like the app store and others digitally sign and encrypt the app.
So it's not something that you can pull apart and run without it.
If you do the Apache public license, you're, you're, you're able to do that.
It turns out, in the early days, we'd looked at building a mobile app for big blue button.
But because of Apple support for WebRTC, and obviously Chrome has good support, big blue button just runs as a single page web app.
There is no app at all. And you, you can run it on the latest like iPhone iOS 12.2 and above or Android 6.0 and above.
You could go to demo.bgb.org with your phone and just launch into a session.
And you can see the audio, you can see the video, you can see the screen.
There's only a few limitations, one of which is you cannot share your screen in a mobile device, but not something you really need to do a lot anyway.
But we don't, that it was huge for our project because it meant that we could focus on a react based interface.
So it's the front end is all JavaScript, all HTML 5 using react to manage all the layout and the UI updates.
And that, and we built it with a mobile first plan so that if you open it up an iPad, iOS, Android tablet, it will work.
And it was a responsive interface. So it's the same code that's running on the desktop laptop Chromebook tablet phone.
And in that regard, the LGPL license is still working fine for us.
Interesting. Yes. Just wondering, last question, last thing from my side, did the LPGL help with plugin development in terms of if, okay, if I want to contribute code, I have to sign a CLA fine.
But then, if I want to keep this closed source, I can do so by not contributing the code, right?
Exactly. So we, the code for big, the button is like, we didn't choose the afero, the a GPL, which is a very.
Yes, it's a very LGPL is very permissive. So yes, if you, as long as there's no distribution event, and that's the key thing, as long as you're running code on your servers, as long as you're not distributing the code elsewhere.
You're fine. You can modify it, right? This is what Google does. They just take open source. They run it on Google servers. There's no distribution event that's triggered. So they don't have to disclose the source.
So in that regard, you're great. Like you could take it internally as a commercial couple, you could take this internally, you could brand it, modify it, the license, you're on side of the license.
You just can't put it up in a repository and distribute the code to someone else, because you can't take away the rights that you got to the code.
You can't take those rights away from someone else if you distribute a derivative work based on big button.
So any extensions that you would make to the product, you know, you must provide full access to the source code under the terms of the LGPL to someone that you give the code to.
Whether you're giving them on a CD or you transfer to a USB stick or you make it available for download on the internet.
And that's what open source is about, right? It's access the right to see the code, the right to make changes.
And I think pretty much everybody respects it.
It's not something I've worried about. Like there's just so many people contributing to the project.
There is a, I will say there is a little confusion sometimes, like can people call it big blue button? Can they use our logo? No.
Like you have to be very, we have logo, we have trademark guidelines, because the copyright, the logo, the trademark logo is different than the copyright of the code.
And but again, most of the times when you see big blue button, it's like an official big blue button from from the project.
And when you see less than a website, it's a lot of people would tribute you that hey big blue button is, you know, this website does not is on a door spy or promoted by big blue button ink big blue button is and big blue button and the big blue button logo are trademarks of big blue button ink.
Yeah, and I think back to our website, which is, which is what you want.
Okay, make sense. I mean, I'm looking at, I mean, I think Chris, I was in big blue button as well for his user group.
But how do you end up with this? You've been to start with and have you, do you have any plans to look at other Linux versions?
So I maintained a packaging for big blue button and Ubuntu was the default one that we chose like 10 years ago.
And we're still doing it.
You will probably start to see big blue button on other platforms.
We made the choice for doing Ubuntu and only Ubuntu for the following reason.
It is a lot to package big blue button. There's lots of components.
A lot for the resources we have then and even less or so now, but but going back in time, there was like, okay, how can we do this?
And we had two choices.
We could do, we could focus on our Linux distribution and do a really good job.
Or we could try to support two or more instantly distributions and maybe not do such a good job in any of them.
And we chose quality over quantity.
And what that meant was we just focused on making sure that if you have Ubuntu 1604 now soon to be 1804, you got a really good chance that you got a good install.
And then if people are posting the forums, we knew what they're trying to do.
As opposed to, you know, we're not the experts in our clinics or Fedora or Red Hat or, you know, Central West or Ubuntu.
We just so we focused, but you may see it other distributions in the future.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.
I mean, if you have limited resources, you focus on one, but the obvious question would be the, you know, the Fedora is the central system.
Is that next, I guess, or I mean, I don't know if you have any direct plans.
I will, I will say the problem thing, which is like we have, we have desires.
But we don't have a road map.
The mantra in our project is we release on quality, not dates.
So we never give a date for anything because, you know, I could tell you this feature will be available, you know, we'll ship it.
Whatever next Monday, and then you'll be like, great, it got shipped on time.
Does it work, right?
Like you don't really care about the time you care about doesn't work.
Like is this feature going to work now?
And we always land on making sure the feature is a product works.
I get it.
People you heard in your first Fedora is definitely on the cost just a matter of when.
Jokes, jokes side frame.
And when I, when I, when I looked at the GitHub issues, I saw the request for 1804, which is the last, or sorry, the second.
I'm sorry, the, the, the LTS before the last one.
And with the, with the new version of, of BBB, any, any timelines for this in terms of anticipated timelines.
When you think it's really, I think you, you entered alpha testing with this.
So we've actually been building it for 1804 internally now for months.
So when COVID-19 hit, it became clear that we wanted to do some things in the current version of the button.
In response to the overwhelming demand.
So we've been iterating on the current version of the button a bit longer than we had expected.
Just because there was so much that we knew what to do and needed to do.
But the next version is building.
It's on 1804.
Our goal is to get it out earlier as like a call it an early beta.
Like the features won't be finished, but we would rather see a lot of people use it.
Earlier on and give us feedback on it.
And the idea is we, we're not going to put something out there.
So the offsetting criteria is we're not going to put something out there that just obviously doesn't work.
So we are going to iterate it internally.
To the point where when someone tries it out, it may not have all the features we want, but they have a good experience.
There's no sense to put something out there and people say, well, these 10 things are broken.
Okay, we can figure that out and fix it first and maybe people have to wait a bit longer.
Again, it comes back to, you know, when you try something out, you kind of want it to work.
It's nice to get things early, but we're not communicating to anybody a date for the next release.
We're just expressing that we are working on it.
Our goal in the project has always been to put out quality releases.
And even if we call something an early beta, we still have a desire to make sure that, you know, the things that you can do in the product work.
One of the highest compliments we got years ago was there was another open source project.
For the conferencing and someone said, look, I've tried both projects.
This other project has more features, but it was very easy to find something that didn't quite work right.
You are project.
You have less features, but everything seems to work.
And that made us feel very good because that's what we were trying to do.
Okay.
I'm just worried about, I'm a little cautious on time.
Yes.
I had one final question really, which was, I mean, you've been doing a big written for 10 years, I guess, something along those lines.
Is there something you'll be doing for the future, or are you thinking of doing something else altogether?
No, we're just getting started.
Okay.
You know, the critical mass has occurred, right?
It is, it is now the child and now the goal is to leverage the worldwide interest in what we're doing and allow the project and able to project continue to grow.
And through that growth, again, the entrepreneurial opportunities and the social benefit, both of those who can be realized.
And I just think with the amount of interest in the project and the need for it.
There's nothing else that we would rather be doing right now is just growing the button.
Okay.
That was a very interesting final statement.
Fred, I would really, we would really like to thank you for being on the show.
Much appreciated.
And this is a word will be spread, not only in Germany, but to all the people who talk to because, as I said, we run it ourselves, just a great system.
And thank you very much for bringing it to life.
My pleasure, guys.
Thank you as well.
Thanks very much.
Okay.
Okay, Martin.
Those are our interview with, yes.
With Mr, with Mr Flixen from a project called Big Boople Fund.
What do you make of it?
Brilliant.
No, it's easy.
Obviously he spent what I like about it is really the approach that they've taken here is the quality first one.
Making stuff work.
And yes, people are asking for help and we have it on.
You've been to 18, 19, 20.
It's not the other, but I like the, you know, with these kind of software as you want, just wanted to work, right?
It's okay.
You may have to install an older version of Ubuntu on a VM or whatever, but yeah.
Making it work is a good mantra.
Having seen the opposite as well, right?
As we do in another project where it takes ages to get something up and running because it's coming.
Yeah.
Of course, we have a worldwide exclusive first now because you're the first.
It's going to come to bed.
All right.
Yes.
Just a lot of time.
We still have to do feedback.
Feedback.
Let me pick up feedback.
Because there was a very interesting feedback posted as a comment if I'm not completely mistaken.
On a Hacker Public Radio, the website that we use to publish the show.
Yes.
And comment by Bendy dating back to the 12th of May, regarding the previous episode.
I didn't realize SkyNet was really in video.
I'm going to bin my graphics card right now.
Thank you so much for this heads up.
Bendy, any time.
Stay put.
I would say, you know, just send it to me, right?
I'm happy I have a few more.
And this is the card.
Apparently Google are running low on them as well at the moment.
So you may like some money.
So of course, isn't impressed by this revelation, but hey, what can I say?
And I think that we have a lot of feedback.
Yes.
Yes.
Do you want to read this?
If I can find it, bear with me.
Do a break.
Commercial break.
Commercial break.
Okay.
Break.
Breakman.
Virginia.
Right.
Virginia.
Alam, Alam, Alam, Alam, Alam, Alam.
Right.
So how we're back from the break.
Back from the break.
Right.
Feedback from Verge.
Which reads, hi there.
I wanted to reach out to tell you how much I appreciate Linux in North.eu.
And I especially love the open source resources you mentioned there.
One thing that I found out was that lwn.net on your page here.
Linux in North.eu.
And it really provided some interesting insight.
Digging into a bit more.
I found this helper guide in the show notes.
It really helped me to do better understand over source software as a whole.
I think it would be a nice addition to your page, especially for all your users.
Thanks again for the great resource.
All the best.
Vergey, thank you very much for that feedback.
As I already said in my mail, we're working on completing the website.
So yes, any feedback and that goes not only to Vergey,
but also out to any other listeners that are out there.
Any feedback on the show, it's format.
And this is also on Linux in North.eu.
Is appreciated.
Any comments for Hacker Public Radio?
Yes, they have the old mailing list.
So free to get in touch with them there.
What's missing Martin?
Sponsors.
Sponsors are missing.
Yes, we're going to do that actually as part of the commercial break after the show.
So as usual, stay put.
Just before the very valuable outtakes,
we're going to have a short sponsor.
Let me work on this.
It's probably not going to be the White House or SkyNet this time around.
But as I said, let's let me work on this.
But there's still some thing missing Martin, namely the pox of the week.
So what is your pox of the week or what are your pox of the week?
I'll just go with one, which is a, by the way, sorry, before I forget this.
Did you cut down the 32nd pause interval so that people get the outtakes a bit quicker?
Of course.
Okay.
You wish.
You wish it's my command as usual.
Whether it's going to be 20 seconds, 25 seconds doesn't matter as long as it's under 30.
Consider it done.
One might be a Martin.
Norris.
Thank you.
My picks of the week.
Yeah, pick.
So one, one, one movie I watched, which I liked and dislikes for different reasons.
It's called Ready Player One.
Basically a, people living in future, living inside a video, well, not living inside a video game,
but they escaped to the video game world because the world is a mess as even more mess as it now.
So the concept is really nice.
The creator of the, this virtual world expires and sets a challenge.
Go find his Easter eggs and your, my company will be yours to, et cetera.
Anyway, so I liked it because of the idea that, you know, even though, you know,
it's a basic video game kind of a man trying to, you can escape the real world if it's rubbish.
So, and they've taken it to the next level, right?
So people can have interactions in, you know, virtual reality gone more real, right?
But yeah, the execution was a bit poor, so good and bad.
Good for its idea, bad for its simplicity, really.
There was a similar movie about a female game designer entering her own game,
but I can't remember.
It's ages ago.
Yeah.
So I mean, there's obviously been a like sort of, of Trump and, and, yeah,
but that's what I'm probably, doesn't put on meaning.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Maybe, maybe it, if you come back in that case, I'm going to put it in the show notes.
My pox of the week is actually, is actually two, two books.
And one is called, he's back.
Essentially, picture, a guy called out of Hitler, not sure if the name rings the bell.
He was some, he was some weirdo.
In the last century, cause a little bit of havoc in Europe,
which led to some minor consequences.
You mentioned he's off streamer though.
Yes, he's off streamer German.
Just in case there's a confusion and a very funny book you find the title,
including the author in the, in the show notes.
He's back.
Describes his exploits when he wakes up after the turn of this.
Sentry in central Berlin and just wondering what the fuck happened.
The book goes on that he meets actually a,
a, the proprietor of little shop and then gets into politics all very funny.
In case you're into that sort of thing, get the audio version of the book.
The book itself is great, but the audio version is even better.
Guy called Christoph Maria.
Perhaps I think is the name.
It does a really, really great Austrian accent with them.
It's absolutely marvelous.
Sorry, is this in German, the audiobook or is there any?
I think you can get an English version as well.
Certainly you can get the paper version in English because it has been translated
because it was that, it was that successful, difficult one.
Okay, a second box is actually the kangaroo chronicles.
It also, it describes the exploits of a communist kangaroo,
sharing a flat with a comedian and also in kind of Berlin.
And the, and the fun stuff that they experienced.
That book has just been turned into a movie.
Also very funny.
And the author, of course, is Mark Overkling in case anybody is wondering about this.
And I think you can get it also in English, Martin, if you have a chance to check it out.
Any anti-entire boxes this week, or should we close the show?
No, I think it's going to be a long one anyway, right?
With the interview, so yeah.
There's one last, yeah, I actually, I do have an anti-box.
It's called audio on Linux.
A number of reasons.
But yes, yes.
I think it's probably going to be a recurring theme.
This may be a recurring box, or et cetera, box of the week, yes.
Leonard, if you're listening, please do get in touch.
We have some suggestions for the next version of the audio.
Other than that, it's a, let her talk it wrong.
It's a great system.
Don't, don't get distracted by the nature.
Same goes for system D. We love, we love these pieces of software.
And before people now get up to sending me death threats to,
did my address is forward slash death, forward slash NULL.
So any, any hate mail, please send it there.
Any other constructive criticism as feedback.
We do love, we do love and welcome feedback.
And feedback for me enough at Linux and launch.
That's also the name of the website we are running for the show.
And needless to say, you will find us for the time being on Hacker Public Radio.
A great community website hosting our show.
We have now reached a full episode status.
What's up for a full show status?
So we do have our own RSS feed on Hacker Public Radio.
Ken, thank you very much for doing this.
Much appreciated.
You find the link at the show notes.
And with that, Martin, see you next time around.
This podcast is licensed under the latest version of the creative comments license.
Type attribution share like credits for the intro music go to blue zero stirs for the song solid market.
To twin flames for their piece called the flow used for the second intros.
And finally to the last year ground for the songs we just use by the dark side.
You find these and other details licensed under CC HMando.
A website dedicated to liberate the music industry from choking copyright legislation and other crap concepts.
Up on the request of a very special co host of the show.
The outtakes have been brought in by approximately seven dot two five seconds.
Hope you enjoy it, Martin.
Okay.
Box shit doesn't matter.
Okay.
That was quite long anyway.
Okay.
Yes.
We do the box ourselves.
No worries.
Yeah.
And we still have to do feedback, Mr. Visser.
How are you stuck for time?
Feedback?
Do we have feedback?
Of course we do have feedback.
Oh, the one.
No, it's two.
Four.
Three.
Okay, let's keep on rolling.
Okay.
Okay.
No breaks.
Just just go ahead.
I'm a bit I'm a little bit sad about arch because that's my favorite distribution.
But hey.
You have to cut your losses somewhere anyway.
It's time for the problem.
Doesn't matter.
Anyway.
Sorry.
I'm not so sad.
Sorry.
We got it.
Are you going to much maintain it?
We got it.
Yes, I am.
We got to edit this out.
Take a particular note for you.
Okay.
Um.
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