‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, October 26th, 2021 at 01:38, <[email protected]> wrote: > I wouldn't trust Zoom any further than I'd trust Skype.
Whilst there are certainly arguments for not trusting Zoom, I think perhaps we need to take a step back here. The reality is that whilst die-hard graybeard open-sourcers take an attitude that "if its not open source it doesn't exist" we have to understand what a service like Zoom (other similarly large commercial video conferencing platforms are available) bring to the table. In particular they bring two aspects: 1) User familiarity. Let's face it, one thing COVID has done is exposed the entire world to the joys (and frustrations) of web conferencing. The honest truth is that most people will have been exposed multiple times to Zoom (and Teams, WebEx and other commercial platorms), they'll already have the software on their devices and become comfortable with its use. 2) Dealing with geographic dispersion. The problem with small-scale (or DIY) conferencing is that you do not have the worldwide presence. This means you cannot deliver a CDN style experience to your delegates where they connect to low-latency to an in-country/in-region datacentre and instead they have to connect accross the world to your server. 3) Zoom specific If you have a paid Zoom account, there are various knobs and dials you can tweak in order to help with some of the concerns generally thrown in the direction of Zoom (e.g "no China datacentres", E2E encryption etc.). Not saying its perfect, but better than nothing.
