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Open Source Alternative for Skype

slackah writes "OpenWengo an open source alternative to skype. It includes features such as sip calls, SMS, video conference, and automatic NAT configuration. It's still under heavy development, but it looks very promising."

6 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Open source alternative added value by jurt1235 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The added value of skype is that they have a pretty good working voice protocol compared to others at this moment. The other part in added value is that they can connect to the normal voice networks globally. Just having an opensource chat program is not going to do you a lot of good in the second case.

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  2. I Don't Get It by MikeyTheK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is the big deal? It's neat to be able to do this sort of thing, but it's, what, ten years ahead of its time?
    Desktop OS's aren't reliable enough yet, and get slowed down at the weirdest times, which means that this is going to be unreliable, too.
    Please give me a cheap-to-deploy, POTS-enabled (yet still cheap) system that a monkey (i.e. the person at the front desk) can administer. It needs to be able to interface with HR so that when a new person comes on board the system is automatically updated, and when a person leaves their stuff is forwarded to their manager and their account is blocked.
    THAT would be great. The rest of this stuff is just a lot of technology for WebEx to deploy to reduce their development costs.

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    1. Re:I Don't Get It by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      asterisk.

      in fact asterisk@home can be administered by a monkey. espically if you compare it to any professional phone system.

      oh, with a bit of perl scripting the phone system can be automated and interfaced to HR databases. something that is 100% impossible with any AT&T, siemens, Cisco, NEC or other phone system made and sold.

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  3. Re:OpenWengoOut? by ghost4096 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The OpenWengo -> PSTN and PSTN->OpenWengo does work... Go to www.wengo.fr to subscribe

  4. SMS Integration by mparaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I couldn't find info on how OpenWengo does it, but SMS integration should be technically easy under Google Talk

  5. Re:Phone Gaim? by n8willis · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The Gaim developers don't talk about it because the Linspire guys have only released the "source" in completely unusable form and refuse to answer simple questions about it. Plus, they didn't make it a plugin that normal users could install, they forked the code and hacked it together. They're trying to weasel the GPL, as they usually do.

    What's more, it's based on an ancient fork of Gaim, so the developers naturally don't have time to waste on it. It'd be great if the Gaim folks added some softphone capabilities, but they'll likely do it starting from the modern codebase. Or someone else will write a plugin.

    Last but not least, the people who created and then later abandoned phonegaim did so because they turned their efforts to creating the closed-source, proprietary replacement for it: Gizmo.

    This they have no intention of putting under an open-source license either. They like to use the word "open" as much as possible on their web site to confuse people into thinking they're open source, but they're not. Frankly the more I learn about Linspire, the less I like them, for just such actions as these. Give your money to a company that supports free software.

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