Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15

wrenhunt writes "The Speak Freely site has this: 'On January 15th, 2004, Speak Freely will be discontinued and removed from this Web site. Existing users may continue to use the program as long as they wish, but no further releases will be forthcoming. For details and the reasons why Speak Freely is being discontinued, please see the full end of life announcement.'" The reasons are various and interesting; it's graceful of the author to provide an explanation of why a piece of software is going away. Update: 01/11 19:22 GMT by T : As reader pi_rules points out, this story is a duplicate -- my apologies.

Comments

Open-source it?

[Faust7]

There is ... no indication that any other developer qualified to do the job and sufficiently self-motivated and -disciplined to get it done exists.

In the vast herd of OSS developers, there are surely some that would qualify in both skill and motivation. Granted, one wouldn't be able to assemble a team of dozens, but that's not altogether necessary--even Linux doesn't have that.

Even if ... another developer or group of developers volunteered to undertake the task, the prospects for such a program would not justify the investment of time.

Well, why not let them decide that?

Too bad -- design was obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Any protocol that isn't designed to accomdate NAT is incompatible with the modern Internet and is obsolete by design.

Yes, in the stone ages, the Internet was "end-to-end". It's not anymore. Sorry for your loss.

Re:Too bad -- design was obsolete

[Bookwyrm]

Bluntly speaking, yes, all VoIP and H323 software is obsolete for these reasons.

People are confusing "end to end" applications with "end to end" mechanisms.

When the telegraph was the latest technology, the 'application' and the 'mechanism' were practically identical -- pulses of electricity sent over a wire. Same with the initial voice and phone system. Over time, though, people started separating the 'application' (voice/information transmission) from the 'mechanism' (eletrical patterns on the wire.) Separating the two layers, now we have the ability to place phone calls that are digitized, sent over wires, over fiber, over radio waves, and coverted back to voice. The application (voice) is still end to end, but the mechanism isn't.

Many protocols today are obsolete because people have and still confuse the 'application' (voice, web access, email) with the 'mechanism' (associated protocols bound to IPv4). We want the application to run end-to-end, because that is what make the application useful -- but folks have confused this with requiring the mechanism to be identical from end to end -- IPv4 without NAT, all the way! That is like saying we should only over end to end copper, with no fiber in between.

End-to-end IPv4 (no NAT) used to be the application -- like in the days of the telegraph, the mechanism and the application were synonymous. That is an obsolete model, though. Our needs and demands have gotten more varied and complex from the point of view of the applications -- the mechanism (IPv4) needs to be separated out from the applications.

Imagine if you could not translate digital information from electronic pulses to optical ones. In order to replace a copper network with a fiber one, you'd have to replace the entire thing at once -- regardless of whether or not that made sense. Fortunately, because we can translate and manipulate the mechanisms, we can use a mix of technologies and capacities and do gradual upgrades and best-fit uses of technology without breaking anything. If people wrote their network protocols and applications *properly*, in a non-obsolete fashion, then the transition to IPv6 would be fairly painless and quick. However, the insistance on end-to-end mechanisms is locking us into IPv4 and makes the upgrade to IPv6 very painful.

Geeze. Isn't it obvious that *mandatory* end-to-end anything is a disaster waiting to happen? If end-to-end lock-in is a good model, why the complaints when companies like Microsoft or such try to make people use nothing but Microsoft products 'end-to-end'? Whenever that happens, people start shouting about open interfaces and needing interoperability between different vendors and products. Yet when it comes down to IPv4, people fall down on their knees and worship the way things have been (badly) designed to *require* end-to-end IPv4. (That is, end-to-end conformity is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the requiring of it is a lock-in that inhibits change and growth, as well as competition.) Modularity, anyone? What next, going to propose that electricty only be made and transmitted as 120V AC end to end, and you can't transform it into DC current or anything else because it breaks the end to end model?

Think a bit more, folks. End-to-end uniformity, conformity, blandness is all well and good, but much of the advancement in technology and industry comes from having standardized *interfaces* and *translations* that allow us to interconnect different mechanisms together to make more interesting things. (No IPv4 is not a standardized *interface* when it is coupled with the requirement to be end-to-end. A good interface should hide the implementation details both sides. The end-to-end requirement violates the hiding principle.)

Speak Freely does hard encryption

[MichaelCrawford]

I can understand why development is stopping, but it's important to understand that Speak Freely is still a valuable resource to the community.

Why? Because speak freely does voice over IP with hard encryption. I don't know of any other VoIP product that does that.

So if you care about your privacy, and have the time and skill, get the source code while you still can, and make a new generation VoIP product that addresses the problems in Speak Freely while continuing to provide hard encryption.

If you wonder why you should bother, read Why You Should Use Encryption.

Thank you for your attention.

One method...

[topham]

One method which works on some NAT routers is pretty simple:

Output a packet via UDP to a particular IP address and port number. The NAT setups I've used will log that, and subsequently allow incoming UDP packets from that IP address and port number. If both machines negotiate via a third party and then trade such packets blind they can then start communicating. Note: some of the UDP packets will be lost at the start of the process... doesn't matter, not a problem.

This could happen to any OSS software.

[perotbot]

If Linus said "I've got my family to raise, and a life to lead without being called Messiah by everyone jumping on the bandwagon,and this isn't fun anymore. you know what? I'm done. " We (/. and others) would be doing two things, one mourning the lost of our "leader" and secondly, trying to find a way to keep development going without said leader. SpeekFreely is the work of one person, if someone else thinks they can fix the problems identified (NAT issues. major code rewrite), then by all means grab the CVS code and fork another project away from the original, that's the point of OSS, you can STOP and if someone thinks it's worthwhile, they'll continue it.

Posting this now is VERY appropriate

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Dupe. ... For God's sake, search for 'speakfreely' in your own engine. It returns ONE result! The same damned article!

That posting was last September.

John is taking the archive down next Thursday. (Possibly Wed night - he's in Switzerland.)

A reminder post now, when we still have a few days to grab the archive, is VERY appropriate.

(Thanks, Timothy!)

That's too bad

[Do not eat]

SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)

When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend!

Wake Up, folks!!

[luck-is-for-rabbits]

John Walker, the creator and for years the principle maintainer of Speak Freely, posted the EOL message months ago, and since then the Speak Freely community has been organizing ways to continue the project and extend the lifetime of the software.

As a long-time user (since 1997) of Speak Freely, I can attest to the care, overall quality and highly useful nature of this package. It has not merely saved large amounts of money, but changed the very nature of the way I conduct communications with friends and collaborators around the world. I am sure it has done so for a great many others as well. New mailing lists have been established to replace the old, and at least one online forum has been offered as another place to carry on discussion about Speak Freely.

Overall, news of the demise of this package is greatly exxagerated. While the founder is leaving, it has already found new homes, with three projects on sourceforge, and developers working on other efforts as well.

This is a natural development in many OSS projects, the orginator sees less utility in the project than others do, and they are free to pick it up. Rather than mourn the loss of this excellent software or wring my hands over the end of OSS, I believe this is in general a healthy develpment, and I'm looking forward to more years of using this package.

DNS vs. NAT-castaways

[Doc Ruby]

John Walker' jeremiad for the Internet claims that pure peer-to-peer archtecture (not client/server) of the Internet is being pushed to extinction by NATs. Behind NAT routers, hosts have private "IP" addresses, which are not routed (or visible) to the Internet. That makes John say, in effect, that it's not the "Internet", which is true by definition: a network of networks, with all hosts visible.

But that's just a definition - finite, by definition (forgive my recursive pun ;). I remember "bang paths" for mail routing on (D)Arpanet (forgive the cryptic pun ;). The Net is now more defined by names than by numbers, which shows the humanization of the tech into a medium for people, rather than a device for machines. The DNS space is unified. Perhaps IPv6 might have forestalled the rise of NATs, with its larger/flexible address space and security. But NAT gives me the freedom to treat my entire network as one multiprocessing host. And its nobody's business, from my broadband ISP, to the person calling me, to the FCC, what I'm running in my closet. NAT+DNS preserves the open Internet, while giving me control of my appearance on it. SpeakFreely's code, by John's own admission, is not translating well through time and revisions. It's not adaptable enough to evolve. But the Internet is. And hopefully the features of SpeakFreely will move through the Net at least as memes, if not as code, in terms people can perpetuate.

Skype shows the way.

[Futurepower(R)]

Skype Shows the way to upgrade Speak Freely. I've been using Skype behind a hardware firewall and NAT that is locked down tight. When Skype found that its preferred port was not open, it simply used Port 80.

The sound quality is better than telephone. I talked to a friend in France for 2 hours yesterday.

But... It would be much better if there were an open source alternative, that could connect directly to the other person's IP, like dialpad.com did. This is a huge need, and I hope someone will accept the challenge. Otherwise the U.S. government's surveillance departments may one day control all communication: Feds Want to Tap VoIP.

Re:Al Gore.

[willtsmith]

It's a joke that perpetuates a stereotype that was meticulously crafted by rightwing think-tanks then peddled on the corporate controlled media.

So everytime I hear the lie, I point out that it isn't true. You watch what they do to Howard Dean. They've already started the effort painting him in a Dan Quayle style. The big difference is that Dan Quayle really is a moronic ideologue.

Re:Last chance to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you call them "Editors"

They do not edit... Fuck, most of 'em can't even spell.

They accept postings and link them to the front page. Remember, they provide no original content here, just relinking...

it's a "Dynamic Bookmark" website for most of us.

Speak Freely SHOULD be discontinued

[Wesley Felter]

Speak Freely was great when it first came out, but now we have a standard protocol for VoIP (SIP), and SF doesn't support it. Rather than keep SF alive, why not work on adding crypto to SIP clients?

Working alternatives?

[ooloogi]

The thing is that Speakfreely does Linux--Windows with crypto, an efficient codec (speex), and some NAT traversal right now. I don't know of an working alternative. Do you know any other combination that will even do linuix-windows over a 33k connection now? I can only think of the huuuge open-h323, and my experience is that it doesn't perfom anywhere near as well with less-than-ideal connections.