Software Freedom Conservancy

We Call on FOSS Contributors to “Exit Zoom”!
After the recent change of the terms of service to Zoom, Software Freedom Conservancy seeks to bring light to corporate abuse of power and focus on making FOSS solutions to these proprietary requirements.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/aug/15/exit-zoom/
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@conservancy I'd had success with JitsiMeet, which uses free software.

@conservancy important to share - hopefully we can be in touch about this living document http://opensourceimperative.org/

@conservancy
Can we please all fund a rewrite of the jit.si remote control code? 😀

@conservancy >foss
>zoom
HAHA NIGGERS GONNA NIGGER

@conservancy

What a wonderful idea. I doubt many will do so but if even a few do that's better than nothing.

Why would Free Software devs not be using an open source video conferencing solution anyway?!

@djsumdog @conservancy It's incredible, isn't it

@conservancy I think this is important work, thank you very much.

In a similar fashion, I've been concerned about the growing number of projects and communities on Discord.

@conservancy I've got family, friends, colleagues, clients drop Jitsi and BigBlueButton because they were too unreliable. Even people who are connected with the F/LOSS movement. For BBB, there's no native Android client for example! https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/15908

Also initiatives like https://www.meet.coop/ tried to be sustainable and failed. Are we willing to put our money where our mouth is?

Calling to "exit zoom" without acknowledging usability, reliability, and sustainability issues is bad.

@conservancy cc @Wtebbens, I'm sure you have opinions on this

@astrojuanlu @conservancy how did meet.coop fail?

@astrojuanlu @conservancy thanks for sharing, that's pretty informative. Lack of proper marketing and poor operations will kill any business.

@conservancy It's sad to hear how Zoom is manipulating user data. Zoom is an essential tool for learning in my country, where many children have been forced to abandon their studies due to the ongoing civil war. My daughter has been using Zoom everyday for her online classes since she was in grade 1, and she is now in grade 3. I think Zoom should take immediate steps to address these concerns so that children like my daughter can learn without fear of their privacy being violated.

@conservancy the problem is finding a way around the network effects. Most of the meetings I go to are on Zoom, and are set up by people who are already using that for other things. I have some one to one chats with a friend on my self hosted jitsi server, but most people put familiarity before ethics.

@conservancy Well, we went down the BlueButton rabbit hole. Are still trying to figure out how we can replace Zoom with something FOSS... Maybe this will work.