Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is calling on free and open source software (FOSS) contributors to stop using Zoom video conferencing in light of the app maker's AI-friendly terms-of-service scandal. Back in March, Zoom quietly changed its fine print to include a clause in section 10.4 that assigned the video-chat biz …
It is free to use https://meet.jit.si/ and open source - you can run it on your own servers.
That is a very good point. Fortunately the Jitsi software is open source and can be self-hosted. That means you could host your own, or choose an EU-based, GDPR-compliant, Jitsi service. I've just found this one for instance: Fairkom.eu.
I'm not sure what relevance it has to this point. Zoom could self-host their infrastructure in their own buildings, and they'd have the same ability to intercept and abuse customer information. They could self-host in your building and still have that ability. How does the use of the cloud make this any better or worse? In this case, you could argue that using something proprietary made it worse, or that using something not encrypted made it worse, but cloud is not really connected to any of the problems they're pointing to.
Primarily because I've never used it.
The potential privacy concerns were quite obvious from the git-go.
I have, however, dropped a couple contracts where the other party insisted on using zoom instead of simply making a telephone call. Does that count?
> I have, however, dropped a couple contracts where the other party insisted on using zoom instead of simply making a telephone call. Does that count?
It lets someone else count your money.
Why do you care about your client's lack of privacy? Does it make their money smell bad?
You can on to tell us how smug you're feeling? Really?
I had to use Zoom for somethings but did it in the browser only. Quality was okay and it had some nice features, so I can understand why it became popular. But I agree that the "the user is the product" was clear from the start. But, what are the alternatives for those not able or willing to host their own server?
I stopped feeling smug before I was a teenager. Just stating facts.
"But, what are the alternatives for those not able or willing to host their own server?"
Oh, I don't know. Maybe pick up a telephone and make a voice call? You know, the thing your phone was invented for?
And they call those things "smart phones"? Assumes facts not in evidence ...
" Maybe pick up a telephone and make a voice call?"
Fine for a 1-to-1 call, a bit more complex to set up a multiway call. Also not possible to send text, which can be very useful in many work contexts eg sending a URL (again, it's possible but very cumbersome to send an sms while on a call, and very prone to transcription errors if saying something that needs an exact spelling). Thirdly, the possibility of screen sharing, it's much much easier to show a problem than describe it, for example, and that's something not at all possible over the phone. There's also the possibility of video on the call, but (a) that can be done without needing Zoom and (b) my experience is that it adds zero value to a work call to see your counterparts face (again, the value of video could be in showing rather than describing an issue that isn't on the system making the call so can't be screen-shared)
Of course there are many conferencing tools not just Zoom
"Can’t say the same about Teams…"
Of course I can. And it's just as true.
I have chosen to never use teams. Absolutely nothing can force me to change my mind. You, on the other hand, have apparently chosen to use teams. But you can still change your mind, if you would like to. It's just a matter of whether or not you have the cojones to do so.
@jake -
I work a lot with distributed teams, we run collaborative workshops, we do pair-programming, we work on architecture design, all sorts of things that require screen sharing, and where it's helpful to comunication to see the person you are talking to. You can't do any of those things on a voice only telephone. If your job can be done using voice only, possibly only talking to one other party, good for you.
Just stop parading your lack of imagination about other people's jobs.
The difference is that while it's quite likely that your telephone calls are, in fact, being recorded (five eyes), nobody is actually doing anything with the vast majority of that information (unless you're a crook moving major sums of money, drugs, firearms and/or humans). In essence there is so much raw data involved that you will be ignored, unless you have already triggered an investigation. They quite simply do not have the manpower to keep an eye on every many, woman and child within their snooping network.
But your zooms (teams, twits, whatever) are being recorded by multibillion dollar multinational marketing companies for the express intent of invading your personal privacy so they can get better[0] at marketing at you. And this somehow makes you feel good?
[0] For very warped values of "better".
>> Sounds like make-work to me. Has anybody actually done a cost analysis? I have.
No you haven't. To have any validity, such an analysis would require collecting a lot of data from different enterprises, and you would need to be able to calculate the value had been generated by work done with and without collaboration tools. It's the kind of analysis that would require.... wait for it.... a team to do. And you'd need to be able to charm all those different enterprises into giving you valuable and commercially sensitive information. Stop saying stuff to make yourself seem clever. It's having the opposite effect at this point.
Forced? That's a big, loaded, scary word.
Are you sure it means what you think it means?
Personally, I have never allowed an employer to force me to do anything. THEY need ME, that's why they pay me. I don't need them. I can always get someone else to pay me the same salary+benefits (or sometimes more) for the same (or similar) services.
Okay, okay, no-one is holding a gun to my head. But back here in the real world, taking a stand against using a slightly annoying piece of software vs. a catastrophic impact on my work and working life makes that a non-starter. (I am a research scientist in academia, and almost all remote meetings, presentations, symposia, conferences, workshops, lectures and student supervisions are on Zoom. It would be exactly the same for comparable employment anywhere else on the planet.)
I am not you, my work is not the same as yours - please do not lecture me on my job (or anything else).
"Zoom did not use customer audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train our AI models,"
Given the sensitivity of information - commercial and personal - that would have been shared over Zoom in the past 3 years, I would say that a "palace denial" wouldn't cut it and there would need to be some solid evidence that data *hasn't* been used to train machine learning models (though how you would prove that I don't know).
"Zoom did not use customer audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train our AI models,"
Which is just too bad. They could use my audio+video+chat to create an AI version of me to attend endless virtual meetings while I sleep or goof off.
Given the sensitivity of information - commercial and personal - that would have been produced on Windows 10 in the past 8 years….
Remember the MS EULA allows MS to read and upload everything on your system…
Given many people have grown up with the telephone network (mobile and digital) that give no guarantees about eavesdropping…
Does this mean that they might have tried to train their AI on my virtual pub meetings? Why would a computer need to know how many drinks it takes to render a carbon-based life form completely useless? Oh wait, I can feel the plot of a sci-fi movie developing ...
But this all comes a little late as we've just dumped Zoom and moved to Jitsi. The 40 minute time limit was OK, as it allowed us to refill glasses and empty bladders, but a few weeks back they imposed a 9 minute wait between meetings which was far too much time to waste. Yes, I'm a freeloader (in this respect), but as I've said before I would have been happy to pay a small fee for a couple of meetings every week, but not the amount they were asking for a basic plan.
Jitsi is very good, and serves us well.
Not just Teams, but the other hosted alternatives really aren't much better. Microsoft is doing a fine job of destroying the competition through its tried and tested tactic and giving it to corporates as part of their office subscriptions and waiting for network effects. It's another okay service but has the distinction of being able to get my machine to lose it's local ethernet connection! ifconfig can't help me there, have to suspend the machine and wake it after a minute.
With GitHub, you can add a new commit to your main branch which deletes all the files instead of the readme and changes the readme to point a link to somewhere else. You then take your full git history and transfer it to wherever else you decided to go. It's not that difficult. I've done it at least once. The reason I haven't done it to all my repos is that I don't care enough to bother. I think some people may be in that camp.
"As mentioned, it's the metadata that's the issue: Pull requests, issues, releases, etc."
Those can be copied if you are motivated enough. They're not that complex a format, and there are various ways of packaging them up and porting them to a new server. The way is not standard since each git-based frontend will have different features.
"It's also the integrations with other systems. Github is also our identity provider for some systems."
That's just a feature that you're using. People value features, and if you decide that you don't want to use a certain system, then one tradeoff is that you may lose some of its features. I can't complain that I refuse to use Linux for some philosophical reason but now this Linux-specific program won't run. It is not Linux's fault that it doesn't happen to also run on something else, nor is it GitHub's fault if you have a feature on it that you don't like switching. In each case, you have the freedom to do the work to get a new identity provider; it's not like GitHub has a monopoly on that service.
That's just a feature that you're using. People value features, and if you decide that you don't want to use a certain system, then one tradeoff is that you may lose some of its features.
It's classic platform lock. Sure, you can switch, but the cost of doing X things on each repository to migrate Y repositories over to a new platform makes it prohibitively expensive. A previous employer found this out when Gitlab changed their fees and removed their "Bronze" level - we needed more than the "Starter" level provided and so had to upgrade to "Premium" at a cost of around $15/user/month. In other words, much more than Github would cost - Github being the preferred platform when we switched over to git, but beaten out by gitlab on price.
Problem was, we had tens of thousands of repos, almost all of them running CI/CD using gitlab - it wasn't just a case of moving all those repos, but moving all those repos, configuring new CI/CD pipelines, reconfiguring all the gitlab integrations - it would have cost millions and taken months.
Changing from Zoom to Google Meet would be trivial compared to that.
They missed a trick in not calling the campaign Zoom Out. It works on two levels, pushing Zoom out of the building and zooming out to see the alternative services.
Also, this excellent piece of sleuthing suggests it was far worse than just some unfortunate wording: Zoom knots itself a legal tangle over use of customer data for training AI models. It seems clearly in breach of many European privacy safeguards and, for instance, I don't think any judge would agree with their definition of opt-in ("we start using your data from the start and then notify you so you can leave the call if you don't like that" is not opt-in). Furthermore they either seem to accidentally or on purpose make a complete hash of their understanding of the GDPR, or who their regulator is.
You just decide not to use it and go to a (hopefully FOSS) alternative.
For existing projects it's more of a pain but if contributors have no problems keeping an open GitHub account then there's nothing stopping them from opening another account elsewhere, the T&Cs can't be worse.
There are some interesting developments happening in this space.
Obviously there were always other Git platforms available, including ones with self-hosting options such as GitLab and Gitea. The challenge was that collaboration with projects running elsewhere still required an account on the other project's server, giving GitHub some kind of network effect benefit.
Projects such as Forgejo (a fork of Gitea), are trying to change that by using the ActivityPub protocol (that also powers Fediverse networks such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc. etc.) to federate between Git instances. That means you could be using your account on your own Git instance to work on your own project but also collaborate with other projects on their own Git servers because all the Forgejo instances can talk to each other.
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Git & SSH on your own machines can do everything you need - GitHub is not bad as a free backup & distribution service though.
“Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.” - Linus Torvalds
As it happens I have a couple of Pi's in use, think they're great but consider them totally unsuitable for this kind of task. And the company I work with also hosts most of our applications including, at my request, a Gitlab server. So, I understand quite well what's required.
That was just making a point - use that machine that you need. The point is choosing to depend on all this ""CI web stuff" is _your problem_. If git with email and patches is "too hard" for your devs & organization to use that is not my fault or my problem! It seems to work well enough to develop that Linux kernel, but perhaps your software is more sophisticated than that, and your dev team larger?
Perhaps the other 29 .5 hours are translating it from the legalese into something a normal user might be able to understand.
I can see the point in commercial contracts being written and read by corporate lawyers, but if your product is aimed at ordinary people, it should not take even 30 minutes to read the terms and conditions. (And yes, this applies to financial insitutions, too. Particularly ones who issue "revised terms and conditions" every few months with a helpful guide to the major changes and (by implication) no guide at all to the minor changes that they don't want to tell you about.)
"Zoom only exists because managers nd leadership think talking bullshit to others is a solution.
Most meetings are a waste of time, just like watching a powerpoint presentation is a waste of time."
Only having thin wire before and during the pandemic I was able to claim any video conf technology was infeasible for me. ;) The total waste of time and space of this organisational layer was quite apparent from observing these superfluous narcissists spending their day whole zooming all over the place like a squadron of demented Roger Ramjets.
I fear that life is too short to acommodate illiterate fools over these low S/N channels. If the corresponding party is unable to render what passes for their thoughts into cogent sentences and literate paragraphs I would suggest they resume their elementary school education or consult their disability services provider but definitely not to bother me.
Been through a raft of audio and video providers at work over the years. Most of us never use the video feed aspect of any of them though we often share desktop presentations. Can't comments on how good or bad they really are, they all seem to work and Teams seems to be the most popular at the moment and haven't used Zoom in ages.
It's my employers laptop, and their choice, along with the client, I don't get a say.
I personally never use video though because my laptop is in a dock, and is closed and not even particularly near me - a video feed of my feet under my desk isn't any use...
Yes, there are some decent alternatives.
I self-host BBB and it is quite good, although it's easy to break as there are so many sub-systems, however the installer has got significantly better in the last couple of years.
Jitsi is way easier to set up, but personally I don't think it has quite the same level of features as BBB.
I should try Apache OpenMeetings again. It was a bit rough a couple of years ago, but i'm several versions behind now :/
Are any of them enterprise-grade? Not sure, but they are certainly worth a try, and I've never trusted Zoom.
If i have to use it, I run it in a sacrificial VM :(
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