Converge with OpenMeetings?

[viktara]

Hi,

BBB and OM - two very similar products based on very similar
technologies - and both opensource.

OM has now moved to the Apache Incubator.

Does it not make sense to join these two communities and have
everyone's effort go into the same project?

Just a thought :)


Vik

[Fred Dixon]

Hi viktara,

While BigBlueButton may seem similar to OpenMeetings, we're are
actually quite different. We've exchanged e-mails with Sebastian
Wagner about three years ago, and, at that time, we both concluded
that we're doing down different roads. We would reach the same
conclusion today.

It's great that OpenMeetings has moved into an Apache Incubator
project. Judging by the amount of effort we've put into
BigBlueButton, Sebastian has certainly worked very hard on
OpenMeetings and deserves a lot of credit for it.

It's also good to have some (friendly) competition between projects.
Like Asterisk vs. FreeSWITCH, you could argue they are similar, but
under the hood their are very different, and the competition spurns
innovation.

Here are some of the differences between OpenMeetings and
BigBlueButton. Note, none of these should be taken as one is better
than the other; rather, they reflect a difference in approach.

- OpenMeetings provides a video of the recording for playback whereas
BigBlueButton provides the individual events and media for playback
(using popcorn.js).

- OpenMeetings uses red5 for audio (with 3rd party integration to the
phone system), whereas BigBlueButton's audio is built on FreeSWITCH

- OpenMeetings uses OpenLaszlo for the client interface whereas
BigBlueButton uses Flex.

- OpenMeetings is licensed under the Apache License where
BigBlueButton uses the LGPL.

You can make lots of qualitative judgements comparing the community,
interface, and development process behind each, but it's really a
personal choices.

We welcome all the members of the BigBlueButton community to check out
OpenMeetings and, if you find it better for your needs, give it a try.

I think both open source projects have very strong communities behind
them. Our goal is to make BigBlueButton the leading open source web
conferencing system for distance education, and to become #1 you need
to have some competition. It's great to have OpenMeetings provide
that competition.

Regards,... Fred
--
BigBlueButton Developer
http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

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[viktara]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the reply.

Having used both OM and BBB there are definitely good points in both
of the approaches.

Handing off conferencing to Asterisk and then Freeswitch was one of
the things that attracted me to BBB in the first place.

Perhaps with HTML5 starting to support cameras we might see a third
approach of people developing decoupled clients and using both BBB and
OM
as their application servers :)


Regards



Vik

> BigBlueButton Developerhttp://bigbluebutton.org/http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

[Pablo Sotomayor]

nice words