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Project Gizmo Challenges Skype
valmont writes "The Register is offering an interesting introduction to Project Gizmo, a new player in the Voice over IP field, poised to challenge Skype with its ability to interoperate with others thanks to the SIP protocol it complies to. Whereas Skype has selectively licensed usage of an API that offers limited insight into a closed protocol, a closed ecosystem solely controlled by one organization, the SIP protocol is open. Free open-source proxy/server implementations are sprouting up, and many developers are actively working on SIP clients. The Gizmo Project is the first to bring a truly-usable, user-friendly, cross-platform SIP client (Mac, Windows, Linux coming soon) to market. Meanwhile, theappleblog.com is already offering a Gizmo Project Wish-List to promote better interoperability between current and upcoming SIP providers, to make it more practical for users of disparate SIP clients to communicate with one another."
What about a BSD compatable client? Last I checked... there are no x86 voip clients that run on openbsd. Although, it is great to see them creating a cross platform client.
When will F/OSS fundamentalists learn that, sometimes, a company gets a Windows product out the door as soon as possible to meet deadlines, and they just have to do minor tweaks and a recompile to produce a (usually better) Linux version a few weeks after, and more often than not these days, when they announce it, they seriously do mean to put out a Linux version?
There's no pleasing some people. The state of Linux is what it is, but whenever I'm not happy with something (it tends to be OpenOffice and KDE these days, for bloat and speed reasons), I remember how much it has evolved and improved for the past 10 years, and really for free software, it's a great achievement.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Me and some of the people I know use Skype and we use Skype for mostly one reason: There's a mac version, and we need to have an application that both the PC and mac users in the circle can use.
If we could have a choice of more than one application to use for this purpose, that would be pretty cool. If we could have the option of an alternate application to use for this purpose that supported or had, like, even a fraction of the featureset of Ventrilo, that would make us deleriously happy.
That said... I may (or may not, depending on my degree of laziness) in the indeterminate future be writing a network-based application into which I want to embed a VoIP / voice chat aspect in the easiest way possible. How hard is it to get that Skype API access, would that be a good way to do it, and am I opening myself up to risk of some kind of license fuckery by doing so?
Come to think of it, how hard would it be to use the Skype API to write a Skype/Gizmo bridge?
And could they seriously not have come up with a better name than "Gizmo"? I mean come on.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I've seen a lot of comments here about open vs. closed etc etc. The reason skype is so popular is because is just works and because the sound quality is so good.
So how good is Gizmo in comparison? Worse, Equal or Better?
Once that question is answered, then there may be something to talk about.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
STUN helps - but only in about 80% - 90% of all cases. E.g. it won't be able to traverse symetrical firewalls. And even if you get the basic call setup right - try to transfer a call between different phones which are behind different NATs - and have fun! While some may argue that broken firewalls are the users fault, just see this from a users view: Skype works - always. SIP works - sometimes. Which one would you prefer?
POTS doesn't have encryption either, nor does GSM (its encoded, not encrypted). Nothing different here.
I was 11 when the Christopher Reeve Superman movie came out.
There are 10 year olds who don't know the Michael Keaton Batman.
I remember seeing Terminator 2 in the theatre in 1991, the same year the babysitter that watches my kids was born. That's the same age difference between me and War of the Worlds (1953)
Madonna was 25 in 1983 (seems like yesterday for me). Jessica Simpson is 25 this year.
Scoot yourself and your cane over and we'll relish in memories of stories past.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Skype for all the gripe we may have against it for being closed source and not interoperable with other VOIP providers (FWD, Vonage etc..) does have the most important feature (and holds a monopoly for it too):Encryption
I didn't like having an old fart snooping on my AIM conversations a few years ago and I put an end to it very quick; I've been using Trillian and now Adium with secure IM and OTR encryption.
As much as I like having cheap calls and all I rather my private conversations stay.. well... private.
Skype is the only interplatform secure voice application.
Gizmo can take it's fancy gui and go right back to the drawing board as far as I'm concerned.
If you ask me voip with sip (ala vonage) is just a disaster waiting to happen, sooner or later somebody will write an article in NYTimes or some mass distribution newspaper about how insecure and easy it is for somebody on your campus/office/wifi... LAN to record your conversation and everybody is going to freak out.
Encryption should be built-in NOW before it is too late to change the standards.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Skype, Ineen, and Gizmo are all proprietary software. But Ineen and Gizmo are based on a standard protocol, while Skype is not.
Microsoft sued HIM for using the name 'Lindows'. I'm not impressed by ACs with no knowledge of what they're talking about.