As a Deaf person using sign language, Zoom is essential for virtual meetings as its the only platform I've used that consistently delivers acceptable video performance. Teams suffers from random issues that just crops up out of nowhere eg videos going blank, sudden reductions in bittate, periods of excessive dropped frames, etc. Google's platform (whatever its called these days) struggles to cope with multiple videos streams, descending into pixelated messes due to adapting down to incredibly low bitrates and regular dropped frames. Zoom is the only one I've come across that manages up to 25 simultaneous video streams without visible dropped frames and at reasonable resolutions and bitrates.<p>Am keen to know what realistic alternatives there are for virtual meetings for sign language users, delivering quality on par with or at least 'close enough' to Zoom. If theres a OSS solution that can do that out of the box it'd do very well indeed.
> A recent analysis showed that it could take up to 30 hours just to read the entirety of Zoom's terms and conditions<p>I wonder whether there's a single human being on Earth who has read the entire T&C word for word. I assume multiple authors drafted and edited specific chunks, so it may even be the case that even the lawyers who wrote it haven't read the full thing, yet users are expected to have done it in some vague but legally binding way.
I actually had to read this whole thing twice because the first time I thought they genuinely wrote all that without even suggesting a single FOSS alternative to zoom. They don't actually <i>suggest</i> one so much as effervescently mention one (BigBlueButton) near the end without describing it at all or even indicating that, yes, this is the what they want people to drop Zoom for. No wonder there's no author listed, this is one of the worst attempts at effective communication and persuasion I've ever seen. You can't sit there and say Zoom sucks without telling us why the alternative is better, especially when 95% of peoples' experience in the matter is that Zoom is an order of magnitude better than everything else they've tried.<p>We in the FOSS community need to stop being worse than our stereotypes.
That is possibly the least coherent press release/call to action I've seen in a while. If there is a convincing argument to be had there, it's buried in twelve paragraphs of flowery language.
"The proprietary and for-profit nature of Zoom also has made it subject to multiple cases of algorithmic bias. The once esoteric seeming issues are now a stark reality."<p>As a huge fan of FOSS, I gotta say this is ridiculous to include here.
Why stop at Zoom? Exit Discord too!<p>Remember when FOSS community discussions occurred in archived mailing lists crawled by search engines? How quaint!<p>Now your average project invites everyone to their "Discord server", the discussions equivalent of a black hole.
I use WebEx, but I can use my video conferencing equipment to call into Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Amazon Chime because they are all interoperable. This is not the case with Zoom.<p>Standards exist for video conferencing, but Zoom refuses to work with them simply because they think their market position will allow it.
Sure, when there's a consistent experience between browsers with decent echo-cancellation amongst other audio processing I'll be happy to move.<p>I don't want to get stuck on lowest common denominator WebRTC, that pales in comparison with a native application like Zoom.