Could current existing code please be added to git.coop/meet?

Tech circle
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I note that on meet.coop - The Online Meeting Cooperative

It states:

Code - We host all our code at the cooperative GitLab instance at git.coop/meet.

But at present I don’t think that is actually true.

(meet · GitLab is also linked to from Code in the main menu top right too, of course).

Please could those repos be updated to include our code current running code? (which I think is the now maybe the same a Collocall code @hng?). I think at present that repo still just the stuff @decentral1se and @chris worked on?

Thanks!

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Good point. AFAIK, there is still a running discussion on opening up sources used internally at Collocall with regard to competition and licensing. All super valid points from what I understand. This doesn’t mean things will not go the way of getting all sources in the open at some point but there are still some things to decide on. I’m a bit out of the loop these days but hopefully this is not completey wrong :wink:

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Ok thanks for the update Luke would like to get more clarity on this in due course.

For me part of the whole point of meet.coop is to create commons and for me part of that is insuring that our code is itself an open commons.

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Although BigBlueButton itself is under the LGPL, Scalelite is under the AGPL, of course I am not a lawyer, but even if this doesn’t require that code that is used to provision Scalelite servers isn’t also released under the AGPL it does beg the question, can The Online Meeting Cooperative call itself an “Open source cooperative video conferencing platform” when none of the code written and used by the project to provision the video conferencing servers is available to the users of the service?

The Ansible code used to provision the WordPress, Nextcloud, Kimai, MediaWiki sites, the Matomo instance used and this Discourse server is released under the GPL and is available at git.coop.

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Yes, I think the issue to publish the current code as it is being deployed by Collocall to run our Greenlight & BBB servers is already on the tech.circle agenda for months. It should be top priority by now :slight_smile:

Maybe @hng and @dvdjaco know more about it?

agree that this is not so much a legal issue - we’re not using Scalite yet, and the LGPL license doesn’t require to publish the code one runs which does do the AGPL - but it is a commitment to the community in terms of transparency and reproducibility in general.

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Yes, I agree that we should be publishing all the code we use for our deployments. @hng recently made some progress on this but I understand they’ve been extra busy with the new lockdowns in Germany. Hopefully we can move forward with this in January.

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Ansible and Greenlight will be published but we (ColloCall) have a huge workload right now and the code needs to be cleaned up and checked for privacy reasons so I’ll take a few more days.

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The meet.coop cooperative principles include:

4. Education, Training, and Information

A key objective of the project is to share knowledge and experience about running the shared services and facilitate its replication, though internal training, documentation, deployment scripts and a culture of sharing knowledge and software under free licenses with collaborative methodologies.

7. Concern for Community

A driving force for this project is our care for privacy and Free Software, to allow people and organisations to have quality online meetings with ethical tools. The project has at its centre the community resource of online meeting services that are shared as a commons between its members. The generated software scripts and knowledge are shared as Free Software and under free licenses, following collaborative methodologies that facilitate replication and a decentralised architecture.

When is the Free Software code that the co-op is producing and using to deploy the servers to be published?

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We’re making progress:

  • Collocall shared the relevant Ansible roles for installing bbb and greenlight in a gitlab.com private repo, pending a final cleanup and review since it used to have some internal config data.
  • We published some new code in git.coop, eg a simple role to deploy multiple greenlight instances independently from bbb: meet / greenlight-solo · GitLab
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Just checking on this. Since some time now we have our code at the public repo at gitlab.com - am I correct that that’s nowadays the official repo, @dvdjaco @Yurko ? Meanwhile we also have the older repo at git.coop.

IIRC the git.coop wasn’t completely useful as not everyone can freely open a ticket there, as accounts creation isn’t automatic. Was that it?

And here the most critical thing: check the footer of our website and observe the repo that is linked there. We should update that ASAP.

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There are still some items in GIT.COOP that we still use (DNS comes to mind) but the software stack is in meet.coop · GitLab

It still needs a bit of cleanup I think but yes, what we deploy is now hosted on gitlab and mostly public now.

You are also correct about the issues with external contributions on git.coop.

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I’m willing to open a merge request for that purpose but I’m not sure I can find the repository that contains the website meet.coop. Is it not at meet.coop · GitLab?

Update: @chris kindly told me it is a WordPress website so no merge request, sorry for the noise.

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