Spreed: Provide the "high performance back-end" for free during Corona outbreak

[rayfun]

Currently, more than ever, it's absolutely necessary for people to stay home to avoid spreading the virus further.
Please consider providing the "high performance back-end" of NC Talk for free during this time so people can more easily stay social on a personal/private level for groups of more than 4 people.

Thank you!

[acsfer]

This would be hard as it would mean provide code & support. Not a service.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S63Q3Xo8dA and also read what is HPB at https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/2515#issuecomment-598808719

[HudsonProdigy]

Yes would be great to have FOSS option for video conferencing during these times. having to rely on zoom and google is not ideal for many people.

[rkorn86]

I've already contacted sales team, if it would be possible to just buy HPB solution without the whole Nextcloud enterprise stuff. We are already using Nextcloud on premise, on a high performance infrastructure, but being limited to 5-6 peers, because of a missing external signaling server solution is very bad these days. We are also willing to pay, but 80 € / user / year is too much for our research centre with > 500 active nextcloud users and > 1200 ldap users.

[fti7]

Please make the HPB opensource or integrate Jitsi as a Backend.

I understand the commercial side, but there might be more Enterprise Goodies (Like a good SIP Integration) which would be worth to pay for in an Enterprise Environment.

We currently use Jitsi Meet, which is very nice and scaleable but of course not nicly integrated into Nextcloud

[gary-kim]

Please make the HPB opensource or integrate Jitsi as a Backend.

We will accept PRs (with the promise of maintenance), for support for different signaling servers https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/2515#issuecomment-598307660.

Jitsi specifically might be a bit difficult because if I remember correctly, their signaling works through XMPP so we'd first need to put in XMPP support, a really big task in and of itself. That is before we start thinking about actually maintaining it. We might be able to use some of the components with some components from other projects for signaling but that would be a mammoth task to integrate.

EDIT: Did you mean integrate Jitsi into Nextcloud? In that case, I think that's a cool idea but that's probably better served as another app. It doesn't really make sense to integrate more than just Jitsi's signaling/muc/etc into Talk.

The main issue with open sourcing the current HPB is that I don't think Nextcloud GmbH owns it: Struktur AG seems to. From the website:

The optional Nextcloud Talk High Performance Backend for large organizations by Struktur AG offers the capacity, reliability and features enterprises need to conduct their business privately, securely and efficiently.

That doesn't mean it's impossible for it to happen, the iOS app used to be closed source because it was developed with TWS but it was open sourced later. I just think it's unlikely and made worse by the fact that it looks like Struktur AG may have given up on open source, at least from looking at their GitHub organization.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Nextcloud GmbH. I'd also love for there to be an open source signaling server that we, non-enterprise users, could use.

I'm working on trying to kludge one together from some open source MCU projects and other open source conference systems but I'm not really that good with WebRTC stuff. :smile:

Until then, unfortunately, me and my friends are stuck on Zoom for our virtual get togethers (yes, I know, Zoom is problematic). Talk without an SFU really doesn't do well with our 15 people calls.

[jospoortvliet]

Hi all,
Sorry, the back-end is simply not ours to give, it is a partner product (as garry-kim said) and they're not willing to do this so that kind of ends the conversation (yes, we've asked, multiple times).

Luckily there are solutions like Jitsi, we have partners that host the back-end which makes it a LOT cheaper and we're trying to make it doable to have calls with >10 people without the back-end in Talk as well (you can now disable video to drop bandwidth and CPU usage by >20x, so a audio call with 20 ppl should be doable). Hopefully that will all help with this.

If you are a charitable organization, school etcetera, contact our sales team and we will connect you to a partner that can get you an affordable hosted back-end. We already have a few partners who host for free the coming months, by the way.

[jospoortvliet]

As I said, we've asked. We have continued to discuss it, and our friends at Struktur have now agreed! The high-performance back-end isn't just available for free, it is now 100% open source. See more in our blog:
https://nextcloud.com/blog/open-sourcing-talk-back-end-rc-of-talk-9-brings-lots-of-improvements/

[gary-kim]

Thank you @jospoortvliet for all you do. It's a hard market and yet you and the rest of the team often do things for the community and improving the FLOSS ecosystem.

And thank you to Struktur as well for helping make Nextcloud Talk a viable alternative for many more people by open sourcing the HPB.

I just think it's unlikely [that Struktur AG will open source it]

Guess I got proven super wrong. Thank you so much for that!