87be50e1f3e9adcff624e7400d421f20
Outsourcing Communications
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THE missed opportunity that the mainstream media never speaks about is migration to self-hosted communication platforms, both for personal and for business use. People and companies needn't outsource their communications to companies like Google and Zoom. Heck, they needn't license any locally-hosted (but proprietary) stuff like Cisco. I myself fell in love with Mumble (family and friends are now avid users), which can be hosted locally at home. There's also Jitsi, which is privacy-respecting. To quote the site: "What are the meet.jit.si terms of service? Discover our terms & conditions here, and learn more about using our services and tools." [1]
"There's also Jitsi, which is privacy-respecting."The Free Software Foundation uses both Jitsi and BigBlueButton (BBB), which is rather old but very reliable. By extension, there are many other SIP-based communication tools and the Free software community boasts Jami, set aside textual chatting tools built around Jabber/XMPP and IRC. GNU has some great projects, they just don't get publicised by the advertisers-controlled media.
The subject of this video was suggested by a reader of ours. "Microsoft is forced to unbundle "Teams" from its productivity suite," the reader said. "Yet it is used. There is not just the problem of the sunk cost fallacy, but mainly no-one reads the licenses for the software which they use. Thus even Zoom is in use."
"Mumble is fantastic and easy-to-use software that can be locally hosted and ensure end-to-end-encrypted voice communication with multiple participants."We need to explain to companies that building their own communication platforms isn't hard and will pay off in the long run. I spent years talking about this where I used to work (up until weeks before my resignation). Towards the end almost everything was outsourced, from Jabber and Asterisk to Slack, Google and Zoom (spyware [2] and worse [3]). What an embarrassment for a company called Sirius 'Open Source'. In recent years it went out of its way to replace its own Free software-based instrastructure with proprietary software that it doesn't even control (not locally hosted).
As our reader put it: "The push should be to at least read and compare the licenses for Zoom, Teams, BigBlueButton [4], and Jisti-Meet. And there should be a push to at least evaluate BigBlueButton and Jitsi-Meet before making any decisions. If they were skipped during the initial evaluation, then they should be examined anyway to avoid the sunk cost fallacy."
People ought to inform and persuade peers and family to adopt Free software for chat (textual, voice, and video). Here's my old video about Mumble. Mumble is fantastic and easy-to-use software that can be locally hosted and ensure end-to-end-encrypted voice communication with multiple participants. By all means avoid Microsoft -- it's by far the worst [5]. ⬆
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