The open source community comes through again!

  

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We've been using a proprietary web conferencing tool for our webinars because none of the open source ones meet all of our needs.   The big problem with the proprietary ones is that you have to use their proprietary player to play back the webinar.  We've been debating giving up some of the features we use (like polling, multiple moderators, etc) in order to just go to an open source tool with open formats but it's hard to give features up.  (By the way, if you know of a tool or are interested in enhancing one of the existing ones, let me know!)  Up until recently using a proprietary tool was more of annoyance than a problem ... then came our talk last week.

We really worried about this for Eben Moglen's talk on GPLv3.  Not only did we expect an audience that advocated open source and open standards but our speaker was very pro-open source.  We decided to go ahead with the tool we knew well as opposed to switching to a new one at the last minute with the understanding that the light version of the player ran on Linux.

Well, after the talk we did get some flak about non-proprietary formats, and while we were scrambling to figure out what to do or how to fix the problem, we got an email from Rick Stanley from the Groklaw community.  Instead of flaming us, Rick was offering to convert the video to an open format for us!  On top of that, when we emailed him back all excited, he offered to document how he did it and send us directions so we could convert the rest of the videos!  How's that for community building?   Three cheers for Rick and all the Groklaw'rs!

So look for the converted webinar video of Eben Moglen's talk coming soon to Groklaw and the OpenLogic website.