As we all know, Microsoft has a straightforward strategy that it shares with most other big tech firms from Silicon Valley: get all our data, then charge us for accessing it. MS 365 and Teams in particular are core to that strategy. This is why they gave it away 'for free' to so many organizations using COVID. To then turn around and send a bill after, because of course people USED it, uploading documents and such. So the lock-in was complete.

What makes Teams special? It's a complete solution. That is, video calls (think Zoom) + chat (think Slack or IRC) + document sharing (Dropbox) and document editing with MS Office, all in one.

There are a ton of open source alternatives, but none really answer this challenge, as most focus on one aspect - video calls, chat, document sharing... Some people 'frankensteined' solutions to integrate different tools, but user experience suffers and they are a nightmare to maintain. Open Source needs a singular, capable answer. And I argue that it exists - we announced it, December 3, 2024!