Zoom alternatives

[fox]

A rather timely article was posted here about open source Skype alternatives. The first one given is Jitsi, which Dougal mentioned at our Zoom PLUG MUG on Monday night.

[Jason]

Thanks for sharing, Fox. Jitsi looks just like Skype and I like that they release everything as open source including their background infrastructure. That it's written in Java is the icing on the cake for this Java tinkerer.

BigBlueButton (gotta' love that name) makes me curious because there is the reference to integration into a server using Drupal, which is what our server runs on. Not sure what kind of bandwidth HD video piles on but it'd be cool to have video chat built into the PLUG website. Perhaps PLUG could morph into an online group with just casual meetings like MUGs with the occasional short demo of what we're doing.

OpenVidu is interesting only in that it has clients and SDKs written in multiple languages. Its, as they say, a good option for developers.

I like Zoom (not included in the article) only because of the name. It reminds me of the kid in that car commercial at the end who goes "zoom, zoom" in a low voice. If anybody here has watched Seinfeld, they might remember Jerry's reference to people liking Salsa because they like saying it, "Sal-sa!".

I wish the article actually included some author experiences with the programs but now that we know some names, we can look for that separately.

[fox]

I've got Zoom on the brain. All my recent online meetings except for PLUG MUG, were Zoom meetings. Correction made.