Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit that serves support and legal services for open source projects, has called on developers to ditch Zoom over recent changes it made to its terms and conditions (T&Cs) over how it might leverage user data to bolster its machine learning models.
The crux of the problem dates back to March when Zoom injected a new clause into its T&Cs that some pro-privacy critics recently argued allowed the company to train its AI models on customer data such as audio and video, with no way to opt out.
In the wake of a deluge of outrage across social media, Zoom sought to assure users that they would have to opt-in to sharing their data for such use-cases, adding clarifying language to its T&Cs to that effect.
Last year, it insisted that developers should stop using GitHub, after the Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform spawned a new commercial Copilot pair-programmer trained on human-generated code — much of which was produced for open source projects.
The long and short of all this is that the Conservancy will be pushing its own self-hosted chat server that’s built on the BigBlueButton open source virtual classroom software, which it said its FOSS member projects have been able to access for a while.
And it will also be running sessions to help other entities set up and configure their own BigBlueButton server to encourage people to “launch self-hosting collectives” as part of a bigger movement to leave Zoom.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit that serves support and legal services for open source projects, has called on developers to ditch Zoom over recent changes it made to its terms and conditions (T&Cs) over how it might leverage user data to bolster its machine learning models.
The crux of the problem dates back to March when Zoom injected a new clause into its T&Cs that some pro-privacy critics recently argued allowed the company to train its AI models on customer data such as audio and video, with no way to opt out.
In the wake of a deluge of outrage across social media, Zoom sought to assure users that they would have to opt-in to sharing their data for such use-cases, adding clarifying language to its T&Cs to that effect.
Last year, it insisted that developers should stop using GitHub, after the Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform spawned a new commercial Copilot pair-programmer trained on human-generated code — much of which was produced for open source projects.
The long and short of all this is that the Conservancy will be pushing its own self-hosted chat server that’s built on the BigBlueButton open source virtual classroom software, which it said its FOSS member projects have been able to access for a while.
And it will also be running sessions to help other entities set up and configure their own BigBlueButton server to encourage people to “launch self-hosting collectives” as part of a bigger movement to leave Zoom.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!