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* BBB instances
@ 2022-09-20 20:41 Elena Zannoni
  2022-09-21  3:23 ` Ian Kelling
  2022-09-25 23:04 ` Mark Wielaard
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Elena Zannoni @ 2022-09-20 20:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list

Hi, Mark, Frank, Chris,
one of the things that was discussed at Cauldron was that it would be
good to have BBB easily available for community meetings etc. Imagine a
group of developers want to exchange ideas about some implementation
details, etc. If they could just jump onto a BBB room on sourceware it
would be a cool thing to have.

Any thoughts on doing something like that?

elena


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-20 20:41 BBB instances Elena Zannoni
@ 2022-09-21  3:23 ` Ian Kelling
  2022-09-21 19:47   ` Bradley M. Kuhn
  2022-09-25 23:04 ` Mark Wielaard
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Ian Kelling @ 2022-09-21  3:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list; +Cc: Elena Zannoni


Elena Zannoni via Overseers <overseers@sourceware.org> writes:

> Hi, Mark, Frank, Chris,
> one of the things that was discussed at Cauldron was that it would be
> good to have BBB easily available for community meetings etc. Imagine a
> group of developers want to exchange ideas about some implementation
> details, etc. If they could just jump onto a BBB room on sourceware it
> would be a cool thing to have.
>
> Any thoughts on doing something like that?
>
> elena

About BBB, It currently includes MongoDB in it's server software, which
went nonfree a few years ago. You can still run an older version which
is all free software and BBB upstream is looking at ways to switch to a
free database. However, right now, I wouldn't deploy a new instance of
BBB. For simple web based video conference, I'd look at Jitsi Meet.
Other options: GNU Jami, but that requires installing a
client. Nextcloud Talk looks interesting but I haven't tried it yet.

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-21  3:23 ` Ian Kelling
@ 2022-09-21 19:47   ` Bradley M. Kuhn
  2022-09-22 19:27     ` Elena Zannoni
  2022-09-23  0:03     ` Ian Kelling
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Bradley M. Kuhn @ 2022-09-21 19:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: overseers

Starting my response to Elena's inquiry with a bit of background:

One of the reasons for SFC's interest in helping Sourceware (and among the
reasons why our Evaluation Committee offered Sourceware project membership
at SFC) is that SFC has become increasingly concerned in the last few years
at how many FOSS projects (even some of our own member projects) are using
proprietary infrastructure to develop FOSS.  We at SFC see proprietary
infrastructure for FOSS development as one of the biggest threats to
software freedom.

As such, we at SFC were thrilled to see how much effort the Sourceware
Overseers have put into FOSS-only infrastructure.  We discussed it with them
as part of their application their commitment to FOSS-only infrastructure.

It fit well with our approach to this problem: we don't want to insist FOSS
projects already using proprietary software give it up overnight, but in an
effort to coax those projects to give it up, we want to offer reliable,
viable FOSS alternatives for project hosting.  We also believe a diversity
of offerings is ideal (to ward of the tendency toward monoculture that
companies like GitHub rely on to entice adoption).

We at SFC have been working on this on a number of fronts for about two
years — it's a hard problem to solve because the amount of proprietary
infrastructure that FOSS developers now use keeps growing.  We're excited at
the opportunity to partner with Sourceware as another, parallel approach.

Now, with regard to video chat, we have indeed been looking closely at BBB:

Elena Zannoni via Overseers wrote at 13:41 (PDT) on Tuesday:
>> one of the things that was discussed at Cauldron was that it would be good
>> to have BBB easily available for community meetings etc.  … If [we] could
>> just jump onto a BBB room on sourceware it would be a cool thing to have.

>> Any thoughts on doing something like that?

At the beginning to the pandemic, with help of a dedicated volunteer, SFC
was able to get an instance of BBB up and running, hosted on OSU-OSL's
infrastructure.  Many of our member projects are already using it for their
team meetings (switching away from tools like Zoom and Google Meet that they
had previously been using).  We're also using it for all our SFC's video
conferencing needs, and many of you attended our chat sessions about the
Sourceware application.

Our initial findings confirmed the (obvious) hypothesis: scaling is
extremely difficult for video chat.  Right now, we've tested a few
(simultaneous) meetings with 5-10 people and our existing infrastructure can
handle it.  We're currently talking with grant makers and partners about how
we can increase capacity.

Our current assessment is that it's unlikely that we can offer BBB services
to the entire FOSS-developing *public* any time soon.  However, if
Sourceware joins SFC, this is a great opportunity to expand slowly, which is
definitely possible.  We at SFC generally would like to do that, and it fits
with the types of grants and work we're already seeking to improve in our
effort to build “FOSS infrastructure for FOSS projects”.

We also think Sourceware makes an excellent partner to begin working on this
for the reasons I mentioned above and others.

But, it will likely take time (and a little bit of funding) to make this
happen for Sourceware once they join SFC.  Nevertheless, I think SFC is the
best partner for this; we have seen that most other fiscal sponsors simply
use proprietary video chat for their projects, or don't have offering video
chat as part of their plans for infrastructure.  By partnering with
Sourceware, our feeling is that we can expand offering beyond just SFC
projects (i.e., to the guest projects at Sourceware that are *not* SFC
projects themselves) in a manner that allows for time to scale and test.

(If we could do magic, SFC would offer BBB services to every FOSS project in
 the world (whether they were an SFC member or not) tomorrow to get them all
 off Zoom, etc., but, absent magic, offering that without slowly scaling up
 is a recipe for crashed servers and unhappy users.)

Ian Kelling via Overseers wrote at 20:23 (PDT) on Tuesday:
> About BBB, It currently includes MongoDB in it's [sic] server software,
> which went nonfree a few years ago. You can still run an older version
> which is all free software

Indeed, SFC's instance currently does this.  We published our methodology on
how to do it as well.  It's important to note that the main database that
BBB uses is Postgres, and MongoDB is only used for runtime session data.

> However, right now, I wouldn't deploy a new instance of BBB.

Frankly, I think this is an alarmist response.  I don't believe the problem
is urgent, given the limited use of MongoDB by BBB, but if the problem were
to become urgent …

> and BBB upstream is looking at ways to switch to a free database.

… surely this work could be funded?  SFC's plan was that if the problem
became a priority [0], we'd rapidly fund the upstream work necessary to
reduce dependency on MongoDB.

But, it looks like you've in parallel put some effort on this with upstream,
Ian.  Can you post a link to a to BBB mailing list thread or bug ticket on
the matter?

Meanwhile, I noticed the FSF has also done various public-facing events on
your BBB instance … Ian, can you brief us on the FSF's current plans to
handle the MongoDB problem?  Are you looking to abandon BBB entirely, as you
hint above?  If not, what's FSF's contingency plan?

 * * *
 
As a side note, in an unrelated effort that we pursued at SFC, we did spend
substantial effort looking into the viability of maintaining a fork of
MongoDB under AGPLv3 after the SS Public License change.  We decided such a
project wasn't worth the effort. (Curious to know if any other organizations
did the same, and if you came to the same conclusion?)

Specifically, I led that investigation at SFC and determined that a MongoDB
AGPLv3 fork was unlikely to succeed.  One reason is there are a lot of other
FOSS options for NoSQL databases.  While MongoDB, Inc. has a tendency to act
as if their solution is amazingly unique, in practice, it seemed that the
popularity of MongoDB over alternatives seemed to have more to do with their
marketing than their technological superiority.  However, I'm not a NoSQL DB
expert (I relied on interviews that I had with those who were), so if anyone
came a different conclusion on this, I'd be glad to discuss it.

So, that work, which predated my and SFC's interest in BBB, did inform my
conclusion about BBB's MongoDB dependency.  However, I'm always open to
revisit that work, and am very grateful that folks in the Sourceware
community really care about the issues of “Is this solution for development
infrastructure really FOSS, and how do we make sure it *stays* FOSS?” — so
I'm thrilled to be having this conversation with you all!

> For simple web based video conference, I'd look at Jitsi Meet.

FWIW, I also worked with an SFC volunteer on a test instance of Jitsi Meet.
We found it to be more resource intensive than BBB.  While Jitsi Meet's UI
is much better for impromptu meetings and chats than BBB, ultimately we've
been reluctant to deploy a community-facing Jitsi Meet instance for fear
we'd face resource constraints worse than we face with BBB.  However,
FOSDEM's use of Jitsi Meet integrated with Matrix to run their event was
intriguing, and we have it on our long-term list to work with the FOSDEM
organizers on how they pulled that off and if it would be possible to set up
a Matrix/Jitsi Meet combo instance in the manner they used for breakout
rooms at FOSDEM.

Generally speaking, I think we shouldn't be avoiding any FOSS alternative in
the space of software development infrastructure.  Video chat is just one of
many collaboration tools that FOSS projects now often need where the
“default option” is proprietary software.

[0] The only ways I see the MongoDB issue becoming urgent is if there is a
    major security problem/bug with the last AGPLv3'd version where no patch
    is available, or if BBB drifts in its usage such that it relies on new
    features that only newer MongoDB versions support.  Am I missing
    something?
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn - he/him
Policy Fellow & Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy
========================================================================
Become a Conservancy Sustainer today: https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-21 19:47   ` Bradley M. Kuhn
@ 2022-09-22 19:27     ` Elena Zannoni
  2022-09-22 22:23       ` Denver Gingerich
  2022-09-23  0:03     ` Ian Kelling
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Elena Zannoni @ 2022-09-22 19:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list; +Cc: Bradley M. Kuhn

On 9/21/22 1:47 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn via Overseers wrote:

(Replying to some of the points only.)

> At the beginning to the pandemic, with help of a dedicated volunteer, SFC
> was able to get an instance of BBB up and running, hosted on OSU-OSL's
> infrastructure.  Many of our member projects are already using it for their
> team meetings (switching away from tools like Zoom and Google Meet that they
> had previously been using).  We're also using it for all our SFC's video
> conferencing needs, and many of you attended our chat sessions about the
> Sourceware application.
> 
> Our initial findings confirmed the (obvious) hypothesis: scaling is
> extremely difficult for video chat.  Right now, we've tested a few
> (simultaneous) meetings with 5-10 people and our existing infrastructure can
> handle it.  We're currently talking with grant makers and partners about how
> we can increase capacity.
> 
> Our current assessment is that it's unlikely that we can offer BBB services
> to the entire FOSS-developing *public* any time soon.  However, if
> Sourceware joins SFC, this is a great opportunity to expand slowly, which is
> definitely possible.  We at SFC generally would like to do that, and it fits
> with the types of grants and work we're already seeking to improve in our
> effort to build “FOSS infrastructure for FOSS projects”.
> 
> We also think Sourceware makes an excellent partner to begin working on this
> for the reasons I mentioned above and others.
> 

My observations regarding BBB is that it scaled well for the LPC
conference. We used it in 2020 and 2021 to host the conference as a 100%
virtual conference. We had about 1000 participants, with rooms at time
having about 200 participants. It was integrated with Matrix. It was
used again for this year's LPC, which was a mix of in person and hybrid
participation. It has had teething problems of course, but overall it
was a good solution.

There were some modifications that were made to BBB and are collected in
a github (yes I know) repo which is public. But I believe most of the
changes were upstreamed.

There is also a long blog by James, who actually worked on the Matrix
integration with BBB here, with good lessons learned in 2021:

https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/linux-plumbers-conference-matrix-and-bbb-integration/

The caveat with the video, was that we asked the participants to mute
the video and the audio, and unmute both only if participating actively.
That kept the load in the acceptable range. You can see that with a good
choice of the size of the servers (on cloud instances for easy scaling)
the CPU usage was not above 70%. We did talk to the Fosdem organizers as
well.

Regarding the use of MongoDB, James tells me that we used something
equal or earlier than mongodb-org 4.4.16, on Ubuntu. In 2020, we used
Ubuntu 16 because BBB was working only on that version, so the MongoDB
would have been whatever was available on that Ubuntu server.

I believe there would be good opportunities to learn from the LPC
experience and the code is available for all the pieces.

> Ian Kelling via Overseers wrote at 20:23 (PDT) on Tuesday:
>> About BBB, It currently includes MongoDB in it's [sic] server software,
>> which went nonfree a few years ago. You can still run an older version
>> which is all free software
> 
> Indeed, SFC's instance currently does this.  We published our methodology on
> how to do it as well.  It's important to note that the main database that
> BBB uses is Postgres, and MongoDB is only used for runtime session data.
> 

Do you have a link to the article?


>> For simple web based video conference, I'd look at Jitsi Meet.
> 
> FWIW, I also worked with an SFC volunteer on a test instance of Jitsi Meet.
> We found it to be more resource intensive than BBB.  While Jitsi Meet's UI
> is much better for impromptu meetings and chats than BBB, ultimately we've
> been reluctant to deploy a community-facing Jitsi Meet instance for fear
> we'd face resource constraints worse than we face with BBB.  However,
> FOSDEM's use of Jitsi Meet integrated with Matrix to run their event was
> intriguing, and we have it on our long-term list to work with the FOSDEM
> organizers on how they pulled that off and if it would be possible to set up
> a Matrix/Jitsi Meet combo instance in the manner they used for breakout
> rooms at FOSDEM.
> 

We did look at Jitsi for LPC... we didn't find it as solid as BBB. But
this was 3 years ago (in 2020) maybe things have changed.

Anyway, I think it's good that we have alternatives and merging our
collective experiences we can achieve a workable solution.

thanks
elena



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-22 19:27     ` Elena Zannoni
@ 2022-09-22 22:23       ` Denver Gingerich
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Denver Gingerich @ 2022-09-22 22:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list

disclosure: One of my employers is Software Freedom Conservancy.  I worked a bit on things related to SFC's BBB server, so thought I could help a bit here.

On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 01:27:36PM -0600, Elena Zannoni via Overseers wrote:
> Regarding the use of MongoDB, James tells me that we used something
> equal or earlier than mongodb-org 4.4.16, on Ubuntu. In 2020, we used
> Ubuntu 16 because BBB was working only on that version, so the MongoDB
> would have been whatever was available on that Ubuntu server.

I have some technical questions about that setup, which I'll follow up about off-list.  I think digging too deep into BBB deployment discussion is (at best) premature for this list right now.

> On 9/21/22 1:47 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn via Overseers wrote:
> > Ian Kelling via Overseers wrote at 20:23 (PDT) on Tuesday:
> >> About BBB, It currently includes MongoDB in it's [sic] server software,
> >> which went nonfree a few years ago. You can still run an older version
> >> which is all free software
> > 
> > Indeed, SFC's instance currently does this.  We published our methodology on
> > how to do it as well.  It's important to note that the main database that
> > BBB uses is Postgres, and MongoDB is only used for runtime session data.
> 
> Do you have a link to the article?

The source with the description is linked from the main page of our BBB instance.  In short, we are using the version of MongoDB from the stock distro repository rather than the MongoDB provided by BBB's repository, as it sounds like you are doing as well.  It seems that few (if any?) distributions have even packaged the SS-Public-Licensed version of MongoDB.  We're curious to know why upstream is pushing folks toward that version, but we didn't want to raise it upstream until we were ready to set aside time for wider BBB deployments, which we do hope to do soon -- possibly with Sourceware as a member project!

Denver

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-21 19:47   ` Bradley M. Kuhn
  2022-09-22 19:27     ` Elena Zannoni
@ 2022-09-23  0:03     ` Ian Kelling
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Ian Kelling @ 2022-09-23  0:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list; +Cc: Bradley M. Kuhn

FSF is working on helping BBB to move databases. In hindsight, my post
was off-hand and alarmist, and partly plain wrong: I assumed that a free
version of mongo wouldn't work with the latest BBB. After posting, I
actually tested it, and the latest version of BBB (2.5) actually can be
used with a free version of mongodb, (i tried 3.6, which I think is fine
to run for many years from now, even if it is in an older distro
chroot). Thank you to Bradley and SFC for documenting the freedom fix
for BBB 2.3 ( https://k.sfconservancy.org/conservancy-bigbluebutton ). I
note that BBB 2.3 still has an indefinite support timeline, so it is a
fine version to use. I'll be working on getting that and the BBB 2.5
freedom fix upstreamed. As Bradley suggested, if you know about this
issue, BBB is fine. At FSF, we evaluated Jitsi a few years ago and found
BBB to be more reliable, a bit more scalable, and have more features
geared toward presentations and teaching, and we plan to keep using it
including for LibrePlanet 2023.

With my personal FSF sysadmin hat on, I look forward to more and ongoing
collaboration with Sourceware and SFC.

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: BBB instances
  2022-09-20 20:41 BBB instances Elena Zannoni
  2022-09-21  3:23 ` Ian Kelling
@ 2022-09-25 23:04 ` Mark Wielaard
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Mark Wielaard @ 2022-09-25 23:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Overseers mailing list; +Cc: Elena Zannoni

Hi Elena,

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 02:41:06PM -0600, Elena Zannoni via Overseers wrote:
> one of the things that was discussed at Cauldron was that it would be
> good to have BBB easily available for community meetings etc. Imagine a
> group of developers want to exchange ideas about some implementation
> details, etc. If they could just jump onto a BBB room on sourceware it
> would be a cool thing to have.
> 
> Any thoughts on doing something like that?

So from experience managing a jitsi server, this isn't really zero
maintenance. BBB (and jitsi) aren't really packaged software and you
must update and tweak the setup regularly because of client changes.

The best we probably could do with the current setup and technical
volunteers is setup a mumble server https://www.mumble.info/ which is
packaged and seems to mostly be zero maintenance.

But that is voice only. For video (and screen sharing) I am happy to
see various people/organisations exchanging their BBB
setup/infrastructure. We should collect all that information and see
which resources are needed and if we can find a (paid) volunteer to
set something up. Creating a clear plan of initial setup cost,
server/bandwidth costs and periodic maintenance costs. The SFC can
then help us setup a crowdfunding campaign for that.

Looking at some of the projects that are already using video chats
(valgrind has a developer chat every couple of months, gccrs a monthly
one, both on meet.jit.si, and glibc has a weekly patch review session
on some proprietary system and the SFC video chats). I would say that
initially we would just need to support one or two simultanious
sessions of 6 till 12 participants (with often just up to 4 using
video at the same time). It would be nice to be able to scale up a
bit. But I think we should not try to make it scale to something
conference size.

Cheers,

Mark

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-09-25 23:04 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-09-20 20:41 BBB instances Elena Zannoni
2022-09-21  3:23 ` Ian Kelling
2022-09-21 19:47   ` Bradley M. Kuhn
2022-09-22 19:27     ` Elena Zannoni
2022-09-22 22:23       ` Denver Gingerich
2022-09-23  0:03     ` Ian Kelling
2022-09-25 23:04 ` Mark Wielaard

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