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I recommend you read The Architecture of Open Source Applications at http://aosabook.org/en/index.h... This book looks at many different open source projects, and can be a source of inspiration (and debate). You'll find some of what you're looking for in it.

Agreed. This guy doesn't really understand scalability.

The OP needs to read how Plenty of Fish started off:
http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

* PlentyOfFish (POF) gets 1.2 billion page views/month, and 500,000 average unique logins per day. The peak season is January, when it will grow 30 percent.
POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind.
* 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second).
* 1.1 billion page views and 45 million visitors a month.
* Has 5-10 times the click through rate of Facebook.
* 2 load balanced web servers with 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of RAM (using about 800 MBs), 2 hard drives, runs Windows x64 Server 2003.

And also about NginX:
http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html

If you "need" multiple servers when you are first _starting_ out you're probably focusing on solving the wrong problems.

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html

I seem to be in the minority in this regard, but in my opinion looking at source code to try to become a better programmer is a waste of time. Looking at the source code of a large project is just a bigger waste of time. Writing code is 10% what you're doing and 90% why you're doing it. Looking at code will tell you what it's doing, but it won't tell you why it's done that way. Add on top of that the fact that every developer has his/her own style and conventions and you're just adding more wasted effort trying to get to the "why" of the code. There's simply better ways to learn how to code.

Save yourself the hassle and go here instead. This book contains a wealth of information about building and working on large codebases (all open source), written by the developers themselves. This will cut through the boring bookkeeping that is 90% of writing software and get to the heart of why they are written that way.

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html (And no, I'm not affiliated - just a fan)

Features here: http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Features

Yes, finally ZRTP (Phil Zimmermann's Zfone prototcol) and OTR. I'd like to see H.323 next, please! It also works over XMPP and Google's gChat infrastructure.

I have to concur with Jitsi being an excellent FOSS (FLOSS) replacement for Skype. The developer has gone multi-platform with Java and some native elements for video and audio. It needs some simplification of the UI, but that's not the hard part. The story of it's development was recently included in a /. story on OSS projects book earlier this week:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/05/23/2227232/The-Architecture-of-Open-Source-Applications
http://www.aosabook.org/en/jitsi.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP

See their FAQ entry titled "[2011-05-24] Is the book available as a PDF or in e-book format?" http://www.aosabook.org/en/faq.html
"We're working on it."
"If you are an expert, and would like to help, we'd be grateful for assistance. "