Suppose you’re an open source advocate and you’ll be testifying remotely in a court case that could set precedent to improve enforcement of the GPL if successful. You’re conflicted! The case is important, but Zoom is proprietary software!

Well:

Originally, this deposition was supposed to be held remotely, but Vizio did not want to learn to use a new videoconferencing platform other than Zoom, leaving the FSF with a choice of using a proprietary platform, or being physically present for the deposition. Rather than being forced to use a proprietary program, we pushed for doing it in person. The delay that this change caused meant costly additional preparation, after which we also spent roughly ten(!) hours in the deposition itself. As you can imagine, the whole endeavor cost the FSF tens of thousands of dollars (which is nothing compared to the legal cost that would come with actually being a party in the case), a significant amount of money to put down for something you can just be ordered to do.

The lawyers on the other team must be utterly bewildered as it costs tens of thousands of dollars to appear in person, but your laptop remains unsullied by closed-source Zoom.

The FSF is a small organization with limited resources and one of our major focus points is license compliance. We are always fighting to have the financial strength to be able to take violators to task, but to do that successfully, we have to be extremely selective as to where our money goes.

Is spending all that money just to confuse some corporate lawyers really extremely selective? You could run a direct mail campaign and confuse thousands of people for the same cost. Zoom somehow became the best known and widely used videoconferencing software during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that probably cost money too.