Kaltura CE Illusion

Community Forums
1

Hi everybody,

I am really disappointed from the kaltura’s illusion of the “myth” that they are open source.
You start installing CE part of Kaltura. Then whe you want to use anything else other than that which makes you select this as product is SAAS not part of the open part.

I dont mean that they should not sell this. But if it is selling than do not cover it with the way you are doing.

At least one can be able to do an average application when you say this is open source but only you have a management console on which you can set user permission etc.

So where are the others? We installed for some others and opensource!!! They are part of proprietary software SAAS.

I really am disappointed, on which I guess a lot feel the same.
thanks.

2

Hello @hakanmoral,

I must say that I do not understand your source of disappointment nor do I think the word illusion in any way applies to the state of things.

The Kaltura Core platform is indeed open sourced and includes but is not limited to, the following components:

Many additional repos are entirely FOSS and a full list of these can be seen here:

Mostly, the projects/products are licensed under AGPLv3 and a license file is included in each repo and is also declared in each package [RPM, deb and NPM] metadata.

On top of this FOSS infrastructure, Kaltura also offers commercial, closed source, proprietary products, such as Kaltura MediaSpace, LectureCapture and others and a SaaS ENV, based on exactly the same code as in the aforementioned source repositories. This was never denied by Kaltura nor was an attempt to mask that fact ever made.
In fact, this is clearly stated in the README in, among other places, our CE packaging repo:

Kaltura Inc. also provides commercial solutions and services including pro-active platform monitoring, applications, SLA, 24/7 support and professional services. If you’re looking for a commercially supported video platform with integrations to commercial encoders, streaming servers, eCDN, DRM and more - Start a Free Trial of the Kaltura.com Hosted Platform or learn more about Kaltura’ Commercial OnPrem Edition™. For existing RPM based users, Kaltura offers commercial upgrade options.

I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean by this but will be happy to get a clarification and discuss further.

Reiterating my opening statement: Kaltura CE, which consists entirely of FOSS components provides a complete infrastructure upon which, one can run a fully functional video platform, including: source media analysis and transcoding, setting and retrieving metadata for your media library, customisable player, remote storage/CDN integrations for media delivery and much more. A RESTful API is extended, allowing anyone to create additional applications and integrations on top of this infrastructure, which is, incidentally, exactly how our proprietary components achieve their goals.

As also mentioned above, Kaltura CE includes two management consoles, both licensed under AGPLv3: the KMC and Admin Console. These let you, among many other operations, manage users and their permissions.

I will gladly address any additional points or clarifications you choose to make,

1 Like
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@hakanmoral

I have been using Kaltura CE for more than a year now and it has come a long way. The overhead cost to run a video on demand system and stream live content has been reduce considerably since I started using the CE platform.

Now, my perception on this is you are not grasping the concept of what it means when they say open source platform. If you need something with all the proprietary bells and whistles like SaaS is available. However, if you have the ability to develop code then you can customize the Kaltura CE to do all the same things as SaaS and more.

Kaltura CE allows you to completely modify the base system to interact with your applications and deliver your content the way you want. It is not a out of the box solution to all things A/V online streaming related. It is a modifiable core solution that save you time from build a whole system from scratch.

This no different then geting a copy of you favorite OS and being piss off that after you install Red Hat, Suse, CentOS or whatever your favorite flavor is and plug it up to the internet and none of the web file you copied to a folder on the system will not load from the web. This be cause the added features like FTP, HTTP, SQL and other feature of a LAMP installation do not work.

Even after installing it you still have develop or pay someone to develop the sleek trending web pages you want to sever from that system. Hence Kaltura CE with the open source API is available for you to build on. Hope you are able to use this amazing tool to build a site to server all the content you have a smoothly as we have.