Hi there,
It's worth taking a moment to explain why you are seeing such improvements but they are not in the core BigBlueButton repository.
There are companies in the BigBlueButton community that have extended BigBlueButton to add value to their commercial hosting. The LGPL 3 license allows for this option. Google, for example, uses primarily open source software with many modifications. As long as they don't distribute it outside their company, they are not obligated to disclose the modifications they make (I would argue that Google makes such large contributions to open source that everyone is pretty happy with their embracing open source).
Many of these companies in the BigBlueButton community already contribute back improvements to BigBlueButton. The amount of their contribution is based on how many developers they employ, and the number of developers depends on the revenue they earn from hosting.
Each release of BigBlueButton is managed by a group of companies that have been working on the product for years. In addition to their own contributions to the core, they review and test pull requests from the community to ensure the high quality of each release. See
With each contribution from these companies and the community, BigBlueButton gets better for everyone.
So it's really good to see companies extend BigBlueButton and make revenue from it -- such extensions don't take anything away from the open source as, for many of these companies, the revenue they earn from hosting drives the growth of the open source project itself.
There's nothing stopping anyone from implementing similar features. Another option, of course, is to engage the company with these features to host BigBlueButton for you. Both choices are open to you, and it's the benefit of open source.
Regards,... Fred