Successful Resistance Against Nonfree Software

Our aim in this section is to show examples of how people have successfully resisted and replaced nonfree software in educational institutions by various means, such as by talking to schools administrators and by setting up freedom and privacy respecting platforms for remote education.

Some of the items below include examples of web-based videoconferencing software. We have verified that in some cases they require to run nonfree JavaScript code to be usable. The GNU Project warns against the JavaScript trap and is providing guidance to the developers of these platforms so that they can either eliminate it entirely or free the code.

If you would like to set up an instance of Jitsi Meet on your own server, we recommend that you do NOT install the standard release, because it does not indicate clearly the licensing of the JavaScript code. Instead, install the FSF's cleaned-up version of Jitsi Meet, which does clearly state the licensing.

Examples

• A student of Computer Science in Poland fights back proprietary software at his university and manages to graduate using only free software.
• In Spain, a father succeeds in getting some of his children's schools drop Skype and switch to Jitsi.
• As soon as MIT Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman realized that nonfree licenses were being offered for teaching online classes, he saw the moral issue at stake and started working to ensure he would not use them. He succeeded in teaching his Spring 2020 online classes using exclusively free software.
• Free software activists in Valencia, Spain, have set up a server running BigBlueButton, an advanced web conferencing system that features sharing of media files and documents, whiteboard, and other capabilities. Although this platform is free software, work is currently being done on this implementation so that it will clearly show the JavaScript licensing. Read more about BigBlueButton and download it.
• The Free Software Foundation runs an instance of Jitsi Meet on its servers and makes it available to its associate members.