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Unfortunately it becomes near-impossible to say no to nonfree software such as zoom, skype, discord, slack, gmail, etc. You will often end up with no job and pe
by ve55 6y ago
Unfortunately it becomes near-impossible to say no to nonfree software such as zoom, skype, discord, slack, gmail, etc. You will often end up with no job and perhaps even no friends or no communication whatsoever by declining to use the world's most popular centralized communication platforms.
Until there is a way to dampen the extreme and long-lasting power of network effects for communication platforms, little will change with respect to this, as no one is truly willing to accept the consequences of declining to use the software that the rest of the world expects them to use.
- EGreg 6y agoUse this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
- kdtsh 6y agoThis is great, but the video has 1000 views and no comments. This is part of the problem - how do you get people to use a platform that no one else is using? It’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ situation, there are already working (non-free) options out there.
- woofie11 6y agoThis is incorrect. It becomes impossible to say "no" 100% of the time. It's very possible to say no occasionally. Indeed, if everyone said "no" when not overly awkward, it would make a world of difference. If everyone was willing to pay even an extra buck for a microwave based on free software, market economics would push for 95% of microwaves to run free software. And if everyone picked banks which ran on free software, being willing to give up just 0.1% interest, every bank would run 100% free software. If everyone who could afford to pay for a free Google Docs clone did so, we'd have nice alternatives. I don't know the adoption, but it'd be enough to sustain a company. And for video conferences, I'd never move a business meeting, but I do pick freedom-preserving technologies when I set up meetings, and many of my friends do as well. No one has ever commented on it.
- Groxx 6y agoThis assumes there are equivalent free software options each time, at only slight disadvantages. That's pretty frequently not the case. Even if you want to claim there exists a stable configuration with all those true, there's still a bootstrapping problem to get there, and we're certainly not past that point right now.
- NateEag 6y agoThis is absolutely true. That said, I have been thoroughly impressed with https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si every time I've used it. It genuinely works well, and it may not be a Zoom killer, but for my one-on-one calls, it has absolutely been a viable alternative.
- DennisAleynikov 6y agoquite stable for me as well with whomever I can convince to chat with me there
- noobermin 6y agoI used jitsi until I was overruled and now we use teams (sigh). It worked somewhat but would start to get iffy after 5 or 6 people would be in a call, especially when they're a few hours away. We'd have to start turning off cameras to get it to work. That of course doesn't seem like a software issue more than it is an instance issue, zoom and microsoft probably have hosts of more servers to handle stuff compared to the default jitsi stuff.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoMicrowave is the canonical example of RMS strange inconsistency where he says that "appliances" don't need to be free software (along with some remarkably quaint dated examples like "watch" and "automobile".) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.en.ht...
- dade_ 6y agoZoom is not allowed by our security policies at work. If I can say no due to security concerns, I can say no for other reasons.