The open source community comes through again!
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.
This has been linked from the Groklaw News Picks section. As a regular reader (and Anonymous commenter), I’m happy that Rick was able to help get stuff solved.
I’d be curious which of your requirements weren’t satisfied by the FOSS alternatives you were aware of. We can always use feature suggestions. :-)
This is great news! Thank you very much for your efforts, Rick and OpenLogic!
But you must admit that a Windows-only format might be viewed by some as a slightly unfortunate choice in the first place. For a company in your business, I mean. ;-)
Luckily you were able to convert your files. What would you have done if the player vendor, say, had dropped support for the next version of Windows? Would the files have been lost to you? In my opinion, the fact that somehow you wanted to convert the files, but your software offered no obvious way of doing this, shows that free formats are always the better choice.
BTW, how did you do it? Are you planning to post the instructions?