Many thanks for these answers. I should have made clearer in my message that some open source conferencing software solutions do exist. Apart from Jitsi, Big blue button comes to mind for example. The salient point is not really the frontend software itself but the investment in the infrastructure to support the bandwidth, something that can be done at the local or national level. In France, "rendez vous Renater" was working ok until the pandemic but the infrastructure behind it was not designed for the sharp increase in use that followed the pandemic. The point is that it became easier to outsource to corporations offering the necessary bandwidth with their software solutions instead of investing in increasing the possibilities of the existing one. In a similar way, some French universities completely abandoned their emailing addresses services provided by Renater because Renater is charging for a service that Google provides for free. (And from what I saw in my short stay in Philly, that may also be the case for American universities). What is new here, is that it is the pandemic and the sudden and massive turn to online conferencing that tore into pieces another possibility of providing and maintaining an open infrastructure. -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré & Science History Institute Alexandre.Hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/alexandre-hocquet https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet ***********************************************