A word of caution on CMS plugins for the Kaltura video platform
Submitted by Damien on
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When the Kaltura video platform was announced in 2007 it made lots of people interested to know more. The promise of a commercially supported open-source video hosting platform, along with the choice of either running your own hosted content server or paying someone else, would be a great choice for both large firms looking to cut costs where they can, small & mid-size sites that want to use an open platform, and (us) developers who want to tinker with something.
Personally speaking, I was very excited about the potential, but was very frustrated when they kept breaking their previously published launch dates for public code releases. During 2008 I got involved with the Drupal CMS and in 2009 researched Kaltura as a standard platform for my then employer. Unfortunately, at the time several components were missing for our needs, so we went back to a different provider.
Skip ahead a year and I notice the excellent Drupal developer Dave Reid complaining that the Kaltura Drupal module had spyware problems along with a link to a discussion about it. After more than a year of the issue sitting there untouched by the module's maintainers (a Kaltura employee), Dave led the discussion to what quickly became a major issue for the Drupal webmasters group. As it turned out, the module was radioing home during both the install and uninstall processes, and despite multiple requests to remove the tracking code nothing was done about it.
After much discussion during which the original developer lost their CVS access, a patch was applied that removed the offending code, an official drupal.org security notice was published and the latest version is now bug-free.
Happy days for Drupal site maintainers.
The question remains, however: of Kaltura's official extensions how many still include the tracker code?