Comparison of zoom and jitsi request

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 7:02 PM Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:
>
> Hello.
>
> As I understand that zoom has displaced Skype, for video calls and video
> conference calls, I am wondering whether anyone on this list, has used
> and compared jitsi, relative to zoom.
>
> I have just received an email message from an Australian political
> party, that is kind of a liberal party (not to be confused with the
> self-named "Australian Liberal Party", that is not), and, is apparently,
> technologically oriented, the message  announcing an upcoming web
> presentation/meeting, and, the message contains this;
>
> "And with our commitment to ethical use of technology, we are trialling
> the meeting platform Jitsi after Zoom recently announced they “totally
> didn’t plan to record your meetings to train our commercial AI, sorry
> about that one guys.” Making money from stealing your personality. Jitsi
> is what’s known as “FOSS” or Free, Open Source Software. What’s not to
> like?
> "
>
> I do not know whether Liam Proven, or any of his colleagues, have
> published a recent review of jitsi, and/or, a comparison of jitsi with
> zoom, on The Register, and, so, as jitsi is supposed to be
> multi-platform ("Operating system - Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS"
> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi (and, elsewhere, it is said to
> also run on BSD) ), I am wondering whether anyone on this list, has
> experience with using jitsi for videoconferencing, and, if so, how you
> regard it, in comparison with zoom.
>
> I note that, at https://jitsi.org/about/ , under the heading "Features", is
> "Ubuntu and Debian packages for easy installation."

I prefer Jitsi, though I have to use Teams and Zoom for work.

Jitsi is open source software. It is maintained by a real company, and
it is audit-able. Open source projects like LLVM use it for their
meetings.

Jitsi has the best Terms of Service if you are concerned about the
security of your meetings. Jitsi will use meeting data only for
quality of service. Teams and Zoom will give the data away to any
partner as they see fit. Teams and Zoom may choose to ship it off to a
partner to train their AI, if they wish. Or they could commoditize it
and sell it to a partner, if they wish.

Here is Jistsi's position on it, from https://jitsi.org/meet-jit-si-privacy/:

    How is this information used?

    8×8 is not in the business of selling personal information to third
    parties.  8×8 uses this information to deliver the meet.jit.si
    service, to identify and troubleshoot problems with the meet.jit.si
    service, and to improve the meet.jit.si service.  In addition, 8×8 may
    use this information to investigate fraud or abuse.

Louis Rossman is semi-famous in the US as a consumer advocate. He made
a compare/contrast video on Jitsi vs Zoom. See
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzt0tzsaWDE>.

Jitsi is web based, so there's no "native app" needed. You don't have
to install closed source software that's doing who-knows-what behind
the scenes. And Jitsi does not require users to register for accounts
to use the service. (I don't know if the meeting organizer needs a
Jitsi account, however).

And I can't belittle Zoom enough. The company is completely
untrustworthy. Confer,
<https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+ftc+settlement>. It's pretty bad
when the FTC takes an administrative action against you. The FTC
suffered regulatory capture long ago. If the FTC moves against you,
then you are the worst of the worst.

Jeff