How the Free Software Foundation Kept a Videoconferencing Software Free

The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard... In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this [after a four-hour review] and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020.

In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program. Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software.

On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software...!

As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important.
Kelling notes he's part of a tech team of just two people reponsible for "63 different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community..."

"a software" ?

[jabberw0k]

Pedantic yes but grammar note: It is a program, a piece of software, or a system. You cannot have "a software" just like you do not have "a clothing," "an information," or "a hardware." Same should go for the awkward and wrong "a firmware" too. It's a piece of software, or just a program. Dr. Pedantic signing out.

Re:

[gardyloo]

Where did you see the phrase "a software"? Maybe my searching ability has degraded: I don't see that use anywhere in the summary, in the original article, or on the BigBlueButton main webpage.
      Thanks.

Re:

[gardyloo]

Thanks. I did indeed miss it in the headline, especially since it was misquoted by the OP (but the meaning is taken).

Never Heard of BBB . . .

[Kunedog]

. . . but somehow I hear of MongoDB daily!

Re:

[godrik]

BBB is fairly popular in Europe.

It is also seemingly integrated in Canvas (a Learning Management System used in many schools and university in the US)

Re:

[gweihir]

I am looking for an alternative to MS teams for streaming and recording lectures. Does anybody here know how much effort is it to get a BBB set-up going with this limited scope? And what do I need in way of a server? I might set my assistants on this later in the year, if they have time.

Re:

[ksw_92]

Some years ago we had a BBB server set up that interfaced with our Moodle implementation. BBB was (is?) a mishmash of OSS, including using FreePBX for media switching and compositing. If you're not familiar with WebRTC, SIP and the plumbing behind that then it can be a bear to troubleshoot. It think that's one reason why it doesn't have the following of, say, Discord.

We ended up going with Zoom later on as it was cheap at the time and the end-users took to it like ducks to water. Now we're looking at other

Re:

[gweihir]

Hmm. That does sound like real work would be needed. Pity. Thanks for the Info!

FSF to M$: Windows should be free

[firecode]

FSF must tell Microsoft that Windows should be free like Linux.

Re: FSF to M$: Windows should be free

[SuperDre]

Why should it be free? Microsoft is still pouring billions of dollars into development of Windows, it's their product. In most cases these days there really isn't a reason to not use Linux if your IT departments wants too, or for consumers. And no I'm not a linux enthusiast or even user.

Re:

[unixisc]

Microsoft recently opensourced MS-DOS, under the MIT license. They should start doing this to all their OSs that are way retired - Windows 3.11, Windows 95 to ME, Windows NT 3.1 to 2000, right up to Windows 7. Windows 8 & beyond can remain proprietary.

But MongoDB is webscale

[Anonymous Coward]

Is FerretDB webscale?

The Dream of Standard Video Calls Never Happened

[BrendaEM]

When I watch a 1970s movie such as "The Forbin Project" I realize that even up to now, we have no standard open video protocol, perhaps because the CODECs, up into recently, have bee proprietary. OBS Studio is one of the greatest open source successes--effectively locking out the commercial solutions. Could we not have a open source video conferencing success, please?