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Comment by daniel_iversen | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if we are in a tech, “like to fiddle with things” echo chamber, but I would not recommend any of these tools to a team in general (even if it was a small product team).. slack and zoom and the likes (who all have free tiers) I find much better, simpler and successful to get started with.

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> I find much better, simpler and successful to get started with.

It is a trap. Traps are especially effective and harmful in panic mode when everyone catches the first bait. In the long run, free software (not as in beer) is much better for everyone. Especially in panic it is essentiel to think thoroughly through your decisions.

Especially zoom which is insecure spyware. Not long ago there was an exploit that allowed any website to grab your webcam feed from zoom. Even if you had uninstalled zoom because the app leaves behind a web server service listening on localhost so the malicious website can just reinstall zoom and grab your webcam.

Wow. This kind of crap is one of the reasons I just hate windows. I still don't understand why installing and uninstalling stuff isnt as simple as it should be.

This was an issue on macOS too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298

Actually the iOS app send your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693792) Pretty rogue behaviour imho.

Slack and Zoom have the advantage of being in FedRamp. I hope some free software competitors bother to go through the process one day, but I'm not going to wait around for it.

You're right. Unless you value "freedom" higher than "simpler, better, and successful".

Some people/organisations definitely do. (I would leave a company that decided to use Facebook For Work, and I wouldn't join a company that uses it.)

Purism additionally pretty much _have_ to take this stance for branding/reputational reasons, even if they didn't believe in it (which I'm 100% certain they do. This is _the_ moral imperative that is the core of their business.)

Setting aside the fact that this is not about a "free tier", what do you do when you have a team of 10 people and you surpass 10,000 messages? "Sorry, we're using the free tier, so that information is gone." That's not a serious solution. (Granted, it works just fine to coordinate lunch plans.)

Using Discourse, GitLab, Phabricator, WordPress, NextCloud, Jitsi etc is hardly fiddling. These are really well tested tools and work nicely.

"free software" in the freedom open source sense. Not money

I'd have no problem with funding bits of OSS if there was a guarantee on it's lifespan. Although Linux it's generally rarely an issue. Mac it almost always is if a dev stops developing and suddenly apple makes a change that just invalidated your purchase.

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