Zoom is still the best performing software. Alternatives fail in various ways. I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and for some companies thrown into the situation it is best to use it anyway. They can't handle more trouble during this time.
We use Webex at work and it's pretty reliable. Only issue I can think of off the top of my head is on Windows, Webex will sometimes freeze. Some colleagues have attributed that to certain bluetooth devices. I've personally not had that happen but have been in meetings where it did.
Edit: Ok, that took all of 10 seconds to get the first downvote. Seriously?
I would guess your colleagues are onto something. We've got a wide mix of Windows and Mac users and can't say I've heard of anyone reporting problems with freezing.
They say they have a Linux app... but Zoom is available in official repos, Flatpak, the Arch AUR, SUSE community, etc. That's huge for me. I don't really have any interest in blazing a new trail to use a web conferencing app.
One pattern I see with videoconferencing is that there never is a tool that works for all. WebEx was great for me but a lot of people complained. We had less complaints with Zoom and as of now Teams works best. I don’t expect this to last though.
I'm in fascinating situation where I have access to two Webex accounts:
1. That of my primary employer
2. That of my consulting client (through primary employer)
I would've assumed they draw upon the same cloud resources; but based on our experience:
1. Client Webex has been basically unusable since day 1 of 100% remote work (~3 weeks ago)
2. Webex through my employer account works 98% of the time for 85% of the people.
I don't know where the bottleneck is with our client's webex - do they have lower tier account (unlikely), or are there some self hosted aspects or authentication aspects that are giving us trouble.
But my lesson learned is - different people will have drastically different experience with a tool for unpredictable / confounding variable reasons :/
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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/) 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.
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.
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).
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
I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do.
XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install
Out of curiosity, what guide did you follow? I followed the docs right on github for synapse, and it was pretty easy. That being said, It was awhile back, and it looks like they've updated the synapse guide.
I couldn't really test if it worked as-is, so I needed to install Riot web, still behind a proxy. It was also going to be my client of choice. That's where things got fun:
- Installing the arch package doesn't do anything, it's just a bunch of static files, so you have to know how to serve them after that
- Riot needs to go to your matrix's /.well-known/matrix/client, so you need to redirect it to your synapse server (and the previous redirect is not enough, because the previous redirect only cares about _matrix, not the root level)
- It failed for me because a setting in the synapse config (server_name) wasn't set, so I had to read the code of synapse to understand how this well-known endpoint is served.
All in all it was still doable, but took more manual steps than I expected.
If all you need is audio and text Mumble works very well. It used to be the primary audio chat app for gaming but unfortunately the field has become fragmented with game built in voice chat and platform voice chat (eg Steam).
Pseudo-related, yet does anyone know of a good replacement for Google Voice? I've heard Asterisk is good software to look into, yet ideally I'm looking for a way to self-host or cheaply have a standard phone number which can send SMS and call normal phones, from multiple devices, ideally with a web interface.
You'll probably need a SIP provider. I just spent 4 days setting up VICIDial and Asterix as a complete noob; can probably definitively say it's not a replacement for GVoice
I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox).
It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on implementing an SFU to support calls with more than 3-4 people. Right now the peers establish a mesh network and it quickly gets expensive to send video to more users.
I've also been paying attention to the criticisms of Zoom and other WebRTC conferencing services and am hoping to implement end to end encryption for intermediate servers using Insertable Streams once the functionality is supported in most browsers.
Thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to work well in Safari on desktop or iOS. Seemed to connect but if you make the video larger than thumbnail or fullscreen it either doesn't show or only displays a small sliver.
Thanks for reporting the bug! I thought I'd fixed this issue. Which version of MacOS/iOS/Safari are you using?
Edit: I just realized that I just hadn't pushed the latest version which contained this fix. v3.0.17 is up and running now (was v3.0.15). Please let me know if you continue to experience this or any other issue!
I'm aware of what the FSF is. Downvoting me because I posted free-as-in-beer alternatives that aren't open source is childish. They're valid alternatives for people that don't want to use zoom and entirely relevant to the conversation.
It's as though the title was "Try these green ways to generate energy" and you responded with a list of petrol engines which are painted green. It's not wrong, it's not unhelpful, per se, but does somewhat miss the point.
OP's post is about choosing free software alternatives in place of proprietary software that abuses your rights. You recommending more proprietary software is entirely against what the FSF's article is saying.
Hangouts Meet isn't free (as in beer or as in speech). It's just that the premium version is free if you're enrolled for the lower-tier version. Note that this product differs in many ways from the "free" Hangouts.
> There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has
The reason is that people do not generally think philosophically or strategically about the software choices they make. The FSF does and, time and time again, their deep consideration has proven prescient. It will be the case with Zoom too.
Philosophically? Strategically? Company employees are rejecting the alternatives.
For example, SpaceX had to ban Zoom because employees kept using their own subscriptions.
I agree that privacy and security are not negotiable, but unless you ban the tool, you cannot force your employees to not use it, there are no better alternatives from their perspective. We have all lived through Skype, Hangouts, Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. They all failed at delivering the experience Zoom delivers.
I wish replacements like these would be practical, but the problem is that they all have flaws for many use cases, while Zoom just works.
Jitsi Meet is the best I've found so far, but even that has some issues — I did a quick test with myself and the Android client wasn't able to send or receive audio. It also doesn't have any notion of a "host", which is normally good, but it doesn't work for a school setting where participants can't be trusted to not kick others.
Work at a large Fortune 10 company and have tried all the major players (I think) - Google, Teams, Skype, Zoom, GotoMeeting, Webex, Join.me, etc.
Webex seems to be the least worst and is fairly reliable and generally works everywhere under all kinds of load (we have meetings that range from a few folks to multiple hundreds with no issues).
Definitely not the prettiest software but it gets the job done.
Jitsi is the primarily recommended alternative video conferencing tool here, which hasn't had anywhere near the security scrutiny that Zoom has had. I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown.
It seems a little much to recommend Jitsi as 'better', when nobody is really sure of that.
Jitsi Meet runs on your own server and lets you videoconference using just your browser and its built in support for WebRTC. That means it gets to leverage the readily available and easily understood security of:
* Traditional Web Servers (Apache 2 or nginx)
* https/ssl
* modern web browsers
Running a videoconference software that just works in your browser over https solves a large majority of security concerns. The video and voice is encrypted over SSL between the clients and the server. It's not end to end encrypted because that's not really possible, but the only place its unencrypted is in your browser and on the server you own and control. If you don't trust Jitsi's ability to password protect rooms, you could put normal http password authentication in front of your jitsi install -- which would break the mobile app but work just fine in your browser.
Lots of the concerns of Zoom's security are resolved by using readily available standards and software instead of depending on proprietary black box solutions that turn out to send encryption keys through china.
EDIT: As kardos notes below the video actually runs over udp on port 10000 so it is not encrypted over https. It looks like video is encrypted[1] but I'm unclear what method it's encrypted.
The web app runs on TCP/443 and benefits from your Let's Encrypt cert. Jitsi also exposes UDP/10000 for receiving streams from clients, which doesn't go through apache/nginx. So what does it do for encryption there?
Fair enough. I just firewalled 10000 and tried talking to a friend and it does not work. The web app indeed runs over 443 but all the video conferencing is done over UDP. However WebRTC is always encrypted. So add on a 4th well tested piece of tech being utilized.
Yeah, I'm not really suggesting that they failed entirely to encrypt the UDP traffic. But I am curious if what they have done has been scrutinized recently. Jitsi was formed in 2003 according to Wikipedia, there could be outdated choices in there somewhere. That they use widely deployed tech is not really enough, we've just seen that Zoom is using ECB mode when they should not, etc.
I recently tried Jami and think it was a great user experience. I love its decentralized nature, but just have nobody to use it with. I'm now using Discord and think its new screen sharing feature is very handy for lessons. The good thing about Discord is that its very popular.
I managed a set of Asterisk PBXen for about ten years. They're extremely capable.
To get full use of it back then, using high-quality hardware SIP phones was a necessity. These days I think that in-browser phones will work very well for most people.
Interconnection with telcos went from unsanctioned to orderable to being widely marketed during that time. If you know what you're doing you can save a lot of money. If you would prefer to have someone else do the work, the virtual PBX vendors are pretty good.
All these downvotes make me sad. I guess we're in a world where people turn off their Alexa for sensitive phone calls instead of choosing not to have an Alexa device in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758131
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756728
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785
Recent and seemingly related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761816
Not so recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155
Not so recent and maybe not so related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324