Re: Off-topic: making WebRTC work in practice (Re: a brief pondering)

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 11:21:11PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> I would much rather it was possible to do my email, social media and
> conferencing through a single app that was not the same app as my Web
> browser. I don't want my contacts information to share an address space
> with active code from a Web site. I don't want my private keys or my
> plaintext messages sharing context either.
> 
> We need an open standard for such a client. Because that is the only way
> users can be assured the client they are downloading hasn't got a backdoor.
> It isn't a perfect guarantee but it is better than the situation I have now
> where my messaging provider reconfigures its app every ten days or so.
> Being forced to install code updates from a single source is a security
> risk in itself. [...]

The problem is that all things infrastructure get commoditized, so
there's no easy way to monetize them.  No profit -> no product.  Clients
are infrastructure in this sense, and if you can monetize the service,
you can fund open source clients.  Peer-to-peer... leaves out or
minimizes the service... which further reduces opportunities for
monetization.

What's the answer?  I dunno.  There are multiple business models that
could give you what you (and I) want.  But it's very challenging.  It's
just much easier, business-wise, to build a proprietary conferencing/IM
system than an open one.

>          [...]. And don't tell me that frequent updates are necessary for
> security, if the code is so buggy it has to have an urgent security patch
> more than once a month, you are doing it wrong.

Doing it right costs labor, meaning money.  See above.

Nico
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