8×8 has acquired the Jitsi team and technology from Atlassian | Hacker News Reader

8×8 has acquired the Jitsi team and technology from Atlassian

jitsi.org

68 pointsToumassa25 comments

I've been futzing about with VoIP since the late 1990's. First as a developer and test engineer and then as just an interested party. When ZRTP came out I was excited, and then Jitsi was developed and I was interested. But everytime I try Jitsi it has terrible quality issues.

About a month ago I evaluated it again, hoping it would have changed since I last evaluated it 2-3 years ago. But it still had terrible quality issues.[1] I want to use SIP instead of Skype, and I want to tell other people to use SIP, but for that to happen Jitsi needs to stop sucking :(

I can only hope this acquisition means Jitsi gets better to a point where I can recommend it, and use it myself. There's a lot to hate about Skype. It's a closed protocol, it's owned by MS, and it's UI is garbage. But everytime I use it I don't suffer from any A/V quality issues, which is actually the point.

[1] By this I mean scratchy audio and video between two test laptops. Whereas Skype had no such problems.

Have you tried Zoom?[1] Seems much better than Skype for business meetings.

[1] https://zoom.us/

Hi there, Jitsi dev here: note that the Jitsi desktop client (the one which supports SIP) is no longer actively developed, it transitioned to being community maintained.

We have been focusing our efforts on Jitsi Meet for past few years: https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/

I'm in the same boat, as I'm sure a few are...we want to get rid of Skype and Jitsi seems to be the best way, but most people don't care too much for video conferencing. Jitsi Meet has waaaay too much overhead if voice to voice groups is all that's needed, especially if you want to self-host.

Is it feasible that the old Jitsi gets a rebirth? It'd be popular, I'm sure.

If you don't care too much for video conferencing why not use something like Mumble[0]. Super simple to install, super easy to maintain (even as your org grows and security rules get complex), supports as many users as you have bandwidth and quality is stellar and the code is open source.

I feel sorry for anyone that has been stuck with Skype anytime after 2007.

[0] Mumble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)

It sure is feasible, but it would have to come from the community. If you are interested in trying to move it forward, please join our community: https://community.jitsi.org/ and start a discussion!

Can I hijack this thread briefly to ask about that one line: "most people don't care too much for video conferencing". Having worked remotely for maybe the majority of my career at this point my experience is the exact opposite and it seems like the one place wherein we got acquired that didn't have a culture of video chats but was big enough to have multiple cities of offices suffered greatly from the simple fact that teams didn't work face to face when needed, and didn't have the tools to screenshare to collaborate. Body language, eye contact, and being able to look at the same thing when working together seem to me like a pretty fundamentally human thing.

I guess my question is that is it really something people don't care for? In my experience it's just vital and teams that don't do it appear worse off for it. Admitting my bias here though. ;)

Interesting to see this here now :-)

I'm part of the Jitsi team, and made the transition from Atlassian to 8x8. I'm happy to answer questions if any, to the best of my ability / capacity.

Bit of an unrelated question, but do you have an overview / idea of how Jitsi SFU compares in terms of features and performance to well-known cloud providers like Tokbox.

any thoughts on how much resources 8x8 would be devoting to continued development of Jitsi? Given that you had pretty free run at atlassian.

All seems to indicate we'll continue the same path.

Jitsi is awesome! We were using https://appear.in for video chat in https://cocalc.com, but appear.in made dramatic changes recently to greatly increase the friction in dynamically creating chatrooms. It was so bad, that we had to quit using appear.in, and thought we might have to get rid of video chat altogether. However, after searching, I found jitsi, which completely solves our problems, and is overall much better, scalable, and robust than appear.in was for us. We currently use jitsi's free hosted chatrooms (just go to https://meet.jit.si/[make up anything here]) and you get a chatroom created on the fly, but with Jitsi we have the option to also easily host on our server if need be, since it's open source. In any case, huge +1 to Jitsi , the team behind it, and the companies (Atlassian and 8x8) that are supporting the development of such fantastic open source infrastructure!

It's interesting how Atlassian is selling many its offerings, first HipChat/Stride to Slack[0] and now Jitsi.

I'm curious why that's happening, was there some sort of leadership change that's trying to focus on "core business"?

[0]: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/new-atlassian-s...

No, Atlassian has the same leadership. In this case it was part of the Stride/Slack situation, since Jitsi was part of HipChat/Stride.

Not sure why hipchat/stride IP was sold, but I think Jitsi is a direct result of it as Jitsi's tech was used for the former sold systems, and thus Atlassian does not need Jitsi anymore.

Nice to see Jitsi here. I have studied in Strasbourg,France where Jitsi was first developed and have followed its development from the very beginning. Big up to you guys !

Never heard of 8x8 before. Anyone who used their services care to comment on them?

Yes, I've used them for the last year and their software is horrid and can barely be used to make phone calls without crashing frequently. Also, their support is quite crap.

That said, they pushed out an update about 3-4 months ago that improved stability a lot.

I’ve had them as a voip provider for about 10 years. We have a landline number that my family has had forever parked with them with a flat annual rate. I’d rate them as medium, there are some rare issues but it mostly works well. Residential voip seems like it’s dead though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they sunset the service.

I use both 8x8 and Nextiva. 8x8 is acceptable, but Nextiva has better sound quality.

We used them years ago for VoIP services but subsequently switched to Vitelity.

I hope it will remain open source.

I just realized that the jitsi desktop client I use is no longer under direct development from jitsi.

All Jitsi projects will remain Open Source.

Doesn't seem like big news. IMHO Jitsi was never a particularly good product and seems like Atlassian finally understood it. Maybe it is useful for some businesses now but I don't see future for it.

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