For the explicit purpose of my personal data not being siphoned off, owned, and monetized by 3rd party private companies via proxy interactions with the government (like, you know, public school) that are almost virtually unavoidable for most citizens.

You trust the competence of the government to keep your information private?

And I can guarantee you they are going to bring in high priced consultants to do the work because no government or board of education is going to ever pay software developers their market value and have them on their payroll.

Private companies (Salesforce, snowflake, etc) offer "government cloud" services where they are restricted by law (fedramp and others) from using your data for their own purposes. Do you not believe that is actually happening? I've worked on them myself.

I find the “more secure” claim hard to believe. More eyes on projects is always a good thing, and “security through obscurity” is a fallacy.

There have been a number of security vulnerabilities that have lingered in open source for years.

Open source is more secure is just as much of a fallacy.

Cheaper as long as costs are externalized, sure.

It’s cheaper because an edTech company can create a piece of software once and sell it to many different school systems at a low marginal cost. That’s kind of how software works.

Would you say with a straight face that Microsoft Teams is better than Zulip/Jitsi?

Yes for large corporations and governments that aren’t just working with Teams, they are working with Microsoft Office and SharePoint and want something that works well and is understood by their contractors. Teams is already bundled and integrated with their massive enterprise Microsoft contracts.

In a given month, as a consultant I’m working with clients that use Slack, Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, and if I’m initiating a meeting, Amazon Chime.