Slashdot Mirror


Ekiga 2.0 Released

Some Anonymous Coward writes "After about one year of development the former GnomeMeeting team has released Ekiga. Ekiga is the successor of the popular GnomeMeeting. Ekiga calls itself the very "first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP". Ekiga is based on the h323/sip codebase, provided by the openh323 project. Also introduced with this release is ekiga.net, a platform to provide the community with free sip addresses."

4 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Name Change by Slack3r78 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since I have the karma to burn:

    GnomeMeeting to Ekiga is quite probably the single worst name change I've ever seen in a piece of software, commercial or free aside. They went from a name that clearly communicated the software's purpose to something cryptic that isn't even easily pronounceable. (Yes, I am aware of the new name's origin, that doesn't make it any less terrible a name for a software project).

    So the new name fails on pretty much every front. It fails to communicate the purpose of the program. It fails to be something the average person will actually remember. It fails to be something that's not going to scare off a neophyte. As a program that's bandied about for inclusion in Gnome proper, this pretty significant IMO.

    1. Re:Name Change by caseih · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Skype anyone?

  2. Re:ANYTHING has to be better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now with names like Ekiga in my menus I won't have a clue.

    Yeah, it's like calling a spreadsheet "Excel". How will anyone know what it does with a name like that. Or calling a retailer "Amazon". In the business world you'd be dead in the water if you used names like that.

  3. Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga? by pomo+monster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Jesus Christ. The eye stumbles on the acronym soup in the very first line of that description. Nobody's going to notice the phrase "audio and video calls," buried as it is among four references in only three fucking sentences to "SIP and H.323." Try this instead:
    Ekiga: Bring your friends and colleagues onto your desktop with Ekiga's standards-compliant videoconferencing and audio calls. Supports all modern VoIP features of SIP and H.323.
    There you go. Direct, clear, helpful. Maybe even stuff the last sentence with all the other technical descriptions in the fine print. What's not to like?