lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.

What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

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bborud 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.

Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.

And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).

There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.

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runarberg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.

I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/

I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).

	▲	Arathorn 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
	▲	mgbmtl 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts. Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.

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pbhjpbhj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.

Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.

It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.