Hi,
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 4:11 PM, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
The right question here is: is it more important for Wikimedia foundation to use only open source than it is to focus on work that directly benefits the movement? There's no reasonable open source to do this function. The ones that exist are terrible, are less efficient, and have to have hardware dedicated to them. In either case it's going to cost money to handle this, the question is, should it also cost engineering time?
Idealism comes at a pretty high cost. The foundation in the past has made a pretty reasonable choice in the past in that they're willing to use proprietary software for functions that aren't directly associated with the projects. The decision is often focused on "if the community wanted to fork the projects, would this proprietary software we're using be a problem?". In this case the answer would be no.
the old default (AFAIK) was Google Hangouts. which I guess is just as closed source but maybe is less cost? note that I'm not saying that sub-optimal cost or source availability or hosting options are necessarily a reason to not use bluejeans. but I would at least like to be aware of the answers to those questions.
OTOH, IMO, the (apparent) inability to use this service with stock Chrome (on a chromebook, stable channel) without sharing my webcam/microphone is a blocker. (which maybe we can get them to fix)
I suppose the service may work ok with a Chrome instance that itself doesn't have access to the webcam/microphone hardware. But that's not good enough. again, IMO.
-Jeremy