3 ms·

Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going t

by atonse 7y ago

Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going to be ugly and not user-friendly. Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? I'd love to have my bias be proven wrong.

okprod 7y ago
The FSF doesn't develop the tools listed in the article. Since it's free software, anyone, including you, can help make it prettier and more user-friendly. But again, the point of the article isn't about which software is free as in cost or easiest to use. It's about taking an ethical stance despite sacrificing things like a pretty UI.
- lutorm 7y ago
  Not just about ethics though, also about making sure a commercial provider doesn't sell you out.
dsr_ 7y ago
Jitsi is very good. You can try it out at meet.jit.si or install your own server in about 30 minutes. (Yesterday's updated Debian packages improved things immensely.)
- daffy 7y ago
  Installing one's own server seems horribly complicated on non-Debian-based distributions.
consonaut 7y ago
I'm the sole it guy for a small university in Germany (~40 FTE users and ~200 students) and here is my take on these tools. I used or tried to use most of them and have a, what I think is, good take on what I can burden my users with. I'm also bored this Friday evening because I can't go anywhere, so... Mumble: Mumble is amazing. I used it extensively playing EVE Online and what can be done with mumble with regards to external authentication and integration is really great. As an enterprise solution, if I have to weigh my time versus expenditure, it's not worth it though, I'll go with MS Teams or Slack. Asterisk/SIP: I actually ran an asterisk PBX with a self made IVR solution for a project at my previous employer and handled a lot of calls with it and saved a load of money compared to what the callcenter would have charged. Asterisk is great but we are back to the time/expenditure calculation again. I can buy a PBX solution and pay someone to maintain it for far less then me setting up Asterisk. I'd rather just buy a PBX and a support contract. For IVR the calculation gets more complicated. Jitsi: Jitsi meet is really great. It's right in that sweetspot where Skype begins to fail for decent conferences (>4 people) and where I'm invested that much that I want someone to blame and a service contract if my meetings get large enough. If you exceed that threshold (in my testing it has been somewhere between 15 and 30 participants) you want to pay someone for this service or run your own server/videobridge (still curious why BigBlueButton isn't mentioned here anywhere in all these Zoom topics). As an educational institution with my amount of users, hosting a videobridge or bbb the hosting budget alone would have exceeded our Zoom licensing cost not to mention my time. At least in Germany there is also the issue with not having a contract with the provider and problems this creates with regard to the GDPR. Jami: I don't actually know this one. OBS: Nothing can touch OBS. It's an incredibly flexible tool and while it could use some usability improvements it just really is that great. With it's usability downfalls it's also not something you can suggest to a casual user, which is kinda sad. Someone please figure out whatever Zoom is doing with the virtual camera background. Setting a simple picture as background without a green screen frankly is one of their killer features. No one talks bout it but so many people are using this that it has got to be one of their killer features. XMPP: Is a weird mention for me, since it's not an application but a protocol. Jabber sucks, most XMPP clients suck for normal users. I'm not aware of any decent enterprise solutions. IRC: Well, IRC is fucking great. I spend so much time on IRC in my youth and I'm fairly certain my earliest linux contact was an IRC bouncer on a friends machine. In the end it's kind of a weird mention as well though, since it's a protocol and not an application. It is also a protocol that is kinda caught between the "I want link preview, VoIP, file sharing, whatever" crowd and the "why is that noobs client spamming my channel with un-interpretable messages" crowd. IRC with a spec upgrade, even if it would induce a permanent netsplit would be great. I'm not gonna talk about the rest. Nextcloud is great, and with Univentions app server (https://www.univention.de/ https://www.univention.de/) is a usable solution that just suffers at scale. Of course I could set up a univention server and nextcloud and imap email and ldap and lots of other things mentioned above but it would cost me a significant amount of money and time and I can have Office 365 basically for free. So, considering I'm spending tax payers money, and I'm in the EU and MS claims to be GDPR compliant... what is my incentive to do any of this? If I'd have one complaint about Zoom, I'd would be that we had one student unable to join from Iran (which is either because of his ISP blocking certain connections or Zoom actively blocking users from Iran). Zoom excludes users from Iran in their ToU but we assumed that would just be for paying users and have a currently open ticket to figure out what could be the issue. So, this is my take. Basically if you have the time and money and want to tinker most of these OSS solutions are great and worth it. If you are operating within budget or time constraints there a valid reasons to choose a commercial provider.
- atonse 7y ago
  Thanks for the great summary. I should've been more clear. I've learned a lot about OBS in the past couple of weeks and it really seems to be the king (for streamers). I'm already familiar with XMPP but feel Matrix is a much better and more modern successor. I grew up on IRC but it probably needs a lot of modern security enhancements.
  - consonaut 7y ago
    Well, at least in my opinion, it was a good question and the answer across the board is "Yes, these solutions need to be more accessible". A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).
    - gentleman11 7y ago
      RMS said one of the inspirations for free software was a particular printer he couldn’t get to work because of a driver issue. The company refused to give him the source code, and iirc said he was not allowed to write his own for it. He did not forgive or forget this slight, and we live in the world he helped create as a result
      - consonaut 7y ago
        I did find it, it was Eric Raymond and "The Luxury of Ignorance" http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
        gentleman11 7y ago
        I think I may have heard it from one of his talks. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...
zamalek 7y ago
> Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? GNU seems to assume that average users are willing to tinker and struggle until they get something to work. Average users won't do this. If users are demanding things like animations and transitions, GNU software which can't even get onboarding right will always struggle. Personal experience: Bad: Mumble is a nightmare to admin. It has confusing popups and so forth when joining a server. UX is archaic. Bad: OBS is the wrong tool for the job (however amazing it is when used for the right job). UX is archaic. Bad: I've always been pretty bullish on XMPP. It's a really great solution that's still looking for a problem to solve. That being said, I have yet to find a client that has the polish of modern chat apps. Bad: IRC. I still fail to log into freenet some 40% of the time, and I'm an technical user. NICKSERV is a complete DISERVice to the platform. Having to switch to alternate nicks if you disconnect is bizarre. Middleground: Riot (not mentioned) needs UX work, but comes close. Middleground: Installed Jami. The onboarding is uncharacteristically competent. Haven't used it for a call. Good: Mattermost (not mentioned) has a daft name (which users care about!), but competes with Slack pretty nicely. Good: Discourse is pretty damned incredible. Good: Etherpad, but has limited use for average users.
- smichel17 7y ago
  Counterpoint: Mumble is by far the most reliable audio conferencing application I've used. Yes, the UX is quite old-fashioned and sometimes confusing. But once you've got everyone set up with it, audio transmission works flawlessly, and at the end of the day that's more than I can say about many of the alternatives.
  - zamalek 7y ago
    Oh totally. I used it for years for gaming and there has never been something as reliable. Once set up, the security was also really great. The average me will just struggle to get the average family to use it.

by atonse 7y ago

okprod 7y ago

The FSF doesn't develop the tools listed in the article. Since it's free software, anyone, including you, can help make it prettier and more user-friendly. But again, the point of the article isn't about which software is free as in cost or easiest to use. It's about taking an ethical stance despite sacrificing things like a pretty UI.

lutorm 7y ago
Not just about ethics though, also about making sure a commercial provider doesn't sell you out.

dsr_ 7y ago

Jitsi is very good. You can try it out at meet.jit.si or install your own server in about 30 minutes. (Yesterday's updated Debian packages improved things immensely.)

daffy 7y ago
Installing one's own server seems horribly complicated on non-Debian-based distributions.

consonaut 7y ago

I'm the sole it guy for a small university in Germany (~40 FTE users and ~200 students) and here is my take on these tools. I used or tried to use most of them and have a, what I think is, good take on what I can burden my users with. I'm also bored this Friday evening because I can't go anywhere, so... Mumble: Mumble is amazing. I used it extensively playing EVE Online and what can be done with mumble with regards to external authentication and integration is really great. As an enterprise solution, if I have to weigh my time versus expenditure, it's not worth it though, I'll go with MS Teams or Slack. Asterisk/SIP: I actually ran an asterisk PBX with a self made IVR solution for a project at my previous employer and handled a lot of calls with it and saved a load of money compared to what the callcenter would have charged. Asterisk is great but we are back to the time/expenditure calculation again. I can buy a PBX solution and pay someone to maintain it for far less then me setting up Asterisk. I'd rather just buy a PBX and a support contract. For IVR the calculation gets more complicated. Jitsi: Jitsi meet is really great. It's right in that sweetspot where Skype begins to fail for decent conferences (>4 people) and where I'm invested that much that I want someone to blame and a service contract if my meetings get large enough. If you exceed that threshold (in my testing it has been somewhere between 15 and 30 participants) you want to pay someone for this service or run your own server/videobridge (still curious why BigBlueButton isn't mentioned here anywhere in all these Zoom topics). As an educational institution with my amount of users, hosting a videobridge or bbb the hosting budget alone would have exceeded our Zoom licensing cost not to mention my time. At least in Germany there is also the issue with not having a contract with the provider and problems this creates with regard to the GDPR. Jami: I don't actually know this one. OBS: Nothing can touch OBS. It's an incredibly flexible tool and while it could use some usability improvements it just really is that great. With it's usability downfalls it's also not something you can suggest to a casual user, which is kinda sad. Someone please figure out whatever Zoom is doing with the virtual camera background. Setting a simple picture as background without a green screen frankly is one of their killer features. No one talks bout it but so many people are using this that it has got to be one of their killer features. XMPP: Is a weird mention for me, since it's not an application but a protocol. Jabber sucks, most XMPP clients suck for normal users. I'm not aware of any decent enterprise solutions. IRC: Well, IRC is fucking great. I spend so much time on IRC in my youth and I'm fairly certain my earliest linux contact was an IRC bouncer on a friends machine. In the end it's kind of a weird mention as well though, since it's a protocol and not an application. It is also a protocol that is kinda caught between the "I want link preview, VoIP, file sharing, whatever" crowd and the "why is that noobs client spamming my channel with un-interpretable messages" crowd. IRC with a spec upgrade, even if it would induce a permanent netsplit would be great. I'm not gonna talk about the rest. Nextcloud is great, and with Univentions app server (https://www.univention.de/ https://www.univention.de/) is a usable solution that just suffers at scale. Of course I could set up a univention server and nextcloud and imap email and ldap and lots of other things mentioned above but it would cost me a significant amount of money and time and I can have Office 365 basically for free. So, considering I'm spending tax payers money, and I'm in the EU and MS claims to be GDPR compliant... what is my incentive to do any of this? If I'd have one complaint about Zoom, I'd would be that we had one student unable to join from Iran (which is either because of his ISP blocking certain connections or Zoom actively blocking users from Iran). Zoom excludes users from Iran in their ToU but we assumed that would just be for paying users and have a currently open ticket to figure out what could be the issue. So, this is my take. Basically if you have the time and money and want to tinker most of these OSS solutions are great and worth it. If you are operating within budget or time constraints there a valid reasons to choose a commercial provider.

atonse 7y ago
Thanks for the great summary. I should've been more clear. I've learned a lot about OBS in the past couple of weeks and it really seems to be the king (for streamers). I'm already familiar with XMPP but feel Matrix is a much better and more modern successor. I grew up on IRC but it probably needs a lot of modern security enhancements.
- consonaut 7y ago
  Well, at least in my opinion, it was a good question and the answer across the board is "Yes, these solutions need to be more accessible". A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).
  - gentleman11 7y ago
    RMS said one of the inspirations for free software was a particular printer he couldn’t get to work because of a driver issue. The company refused to give him the source code, and iirc said he was not allowed to write his own for it. He did not forgive or forget this slight, and we live in the world he helped create as a result
    - consonaut 7y ago
      I did find it, it was Eric Raymond and "The Luxury of Ignorance" http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
      - gentleman11 7y ago
        I think I may have heard it from one of his talks. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

zamalek 7y ago

> Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? GNU seems to assume that average users are willing to tinker and struggle until they get something to work. Average users won't do this. If users are demanding things like animations and transitions, GNU software which can't even get onboarding right will always struggle. Personal experience: Bad: Mumble is a nightmare to admin. It has confusing popups and so forth when joining a server. UX is archaic. Bad: OBS is the wrong tool for the job (however amazing it is when used for the right job). UX is archaic. Bad: I've always been pretty bullish on XMPP. It's a really great solution that's still looking for a problem to solve. That being said, I have yet to find a client that has the polish of modern chat apps. Bad: IRC. I still fail to log into freenet some 40% of the time, and I'm an technical user. NICKSERV is a complete DISERVice to the platform. Having to switch to alternate nicks if you disconnect is bizarre. Middleground: Riot (not mentioned) needs UX work, but comes close. Middleground: Installed Jami. The onboarding is uncharacteristically competent. Haven't used it for a call. Good: Mattermost (not mentioned) has a daft name (which users care about!), but competes with Slack pretty nicely. Good: Discourse is pretty damned incredible. Good: Etherpad, but has limited use for average users.

smichel17 7y ago
Counterpoint: Mumble is by far the most reliable audio conferencing application I've used. Yes, the UX is quite old-fashioned and sometimes confusing. But once you've got everyone set up with it, audio transmission works flawlessly, and at the end of the day that's more than I can say about many of the alternatives.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Oh totally. I used it for years for gaming and there has never been something as reliable. Once set up, the security was also really great. The average me will just struggle to get the average family to use it.