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Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15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.
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
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.
~corporate tool, but employed~
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!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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!
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.