Linux-Friendly Alternatives To Skype

jfruhlinger writes "When Microsoft bought Skype, Linux and Mac users were assured that their platforms wouldn't be neglected — but you can understand why they might be a bit suspicious. Steven Vaughan-Nichols has compiled a list of five Linux-friendly alternatives — do you know of any others?"

Comments

Sky .NET

[BmlA]

I don't think Linux developers understand the problem. Once again. It's not about the technology underhood or that the protocol is open. The fact is these things need to be able to call to the "real world" and be able to receive calls from there. Basement geeks probably don't understand it, but that's what most normal people use Skype for. It will also need clients on tons of mobile phones AND it needs to be able to be used with Skype users. Now that Microsoft owns part of Facebook they will probably start using Skype too. You won't win this just because your application is "open".

Re:Sky .NET

[metageek]

Absolutely!
It is indeed the very large user-base of skype that makes it so valuable (associated with its protocal closeness). Not only that but also the skype-in service which allows me to be able to answer my calls wherever I am in the world. I didn't see that service in the comparison. Even though there may be similar SIP-based services out there, they are unlikely to have all the characteristics of skype. So for now, a true substitution of skype would consists of several packages.

I use skype for a bunch of things, not just skype-to-skype, but sending SMS, calling out to "real" phones, and last but not least skype-in. The latter feature means that I cannot get a substitute. So for now I keep using skype, if it disappears from Linux I will have to use it on a VM. It is a killer app, and it is worth all the 8.5 billion that MS paid for it (really much more useful than office).

Re:Sky .NET

[Yvan256]

Here's the current situation:
- Email works everywhere. There's no "Microsoft email vs Google email" problems. You have an email account, you can send and receive email from other users with an email account. It's all compatible, world-wide.
- Instant messaging doesn't work everywhere. AIM, MSN, ICQ, SMS... all incompatible. It's a mess.
- Voice calls doesn't work everywhere. Skype, Google Voice... all incompatible. It's a mess.
- Video calls doesn't work everywhere. Skype, Facetime... all incompatible. It's a mess.

If we can't even agree on a standard for even text messaging, forget about voice calls and video calls.

What we need to do is agree on a standard that can do all this: text messages, files transfers, audio calls, video calls, from one to multiple users for each of those.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't win this just because your application is "open".

True, but you also can't win unless it is.

Re:Sky .NET

[metageek]

You are right, but there is a timing for an open standard be successful, and skype just managed to get so widespread usage that any open standard will be sidelined as long as skype does not want to play ball. I'm afraid to say that this purchase was a bright move from the Redmond dinosaur, perhaps there are still people there with brains...

Re:Sky .NET

[at_slashdot]

There are no "Linux developers" involved, most of those programs work on other platforms and have nothing special to do with Linux or with "Linux developers" lack of understanding.

Re:Sky .NET

[tlhIngan]

You are right, but there is a timing for an open standard be successful, and skype just managed to get so widespread usage that any open standard will be sidelined as long as skype does not want to play ball. I'm afraid to say that this purchase was a bright move from the Redmond dinosaur, perhaps there are still people there with brains...

I think the VoIP standards were available before Skype made it big. Heck telephony over the internet was around since hte early 90's, even encrypted (PGPfone anyone?).

No, the reason Skype worked was it ... just worked. No crappy port forward configurations in the router, no dozens of firewall settings need to be changed, etc. It. Just. Worked. You started it up, it ran.and connected.

Sure NAT and STUN are hacks, but they do work through most firewalls just fine, and Skype's architecture ensures it can get through firewalls easily enough.

Moving to IPv6 isn't a solution - it's not like everyone's going to run IPv6 without a firewall. And convincing Joe Average to figure out how to configure their router to let IPv6 through for their SIP phone... not happening.

Hell, Apple, release the FaceTime specs already as well - it too Just Works(tm) without firewall configuration.

Re:Sky .NET

[icebraining]

Don't we have UPnP for this?

Re:Sky .NET

[AliasMarlowe]

I don't think Linux developers understand the problem. Once again. It's not about the technology underhood or that the protocol is open. The fact is these things need to be able to call to the "real world" and be able to receive calls from there.

Curiously, I have never done so. I have only used Skype for calling other Skype users, including video calls and conference calls. It's an attractive value proposition when transatlantic rates would apply to regular calls.

Basement geeks probably don't understand it, but that's what most normal people use Skype for.

What does "normal people" mean here? I'm middle-aged and married with teenage kids. We own our house, cars, etc.

It will also need clients on tons of mobile phones AND it needs to be able to be used with Skype users. Now that Microsoft owns part of Facebook they will probably start using Skype too. You won't win this just because your application is "open".

Maybe not, but interconnectivity is a requirement for any solution which hopes to "win", or even to endure in the game. Consider regular telephony or mobile telephony. It does not matter whether your equipment is ancient Bell stuff, or whether it's a GSM or CDMA cellphone: they all interoperate seamlessly. That's what's needed from Skype and from anything else which hopes to compete. And Skype won't get there unless it opens up. When it opens up, there will be interoperable alternatives.
The walled garden approach does give a first-mover advantage, but this can later turn into a handicap.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "normal people" mean here? I'm middle-aged and married with teenage kids. We own our house, cars, etc.

You're posting on slashdot. This precludes you from being normal.

Re:Sky .NET

[Americano]

Interestingly, it appears as if there may be some further movement in the Facetime specs coming soon. See the speculation here:

http://www.subfurther.com/blog/2011/05/10/long-past-time-to-open-facetime/

Re:Sky .NET

[Simon80]

Any open SIP client can indeed send and receive calls to the real world, through the PSTN, using services from a variety of companies.

Re:Sky .NET

[Spykk]

In the "real world" people use a phone when they want to call someone else on the phone. They use skype when a phone call isn't feasible.

Re:Sky .NET

[monoqlith]

I disagree. Google Voice - although non-free - gives you a phone number that can map to your google talk account, and Google Talk servers are federated. This makes XMPP and Jingle a viable competitor to Skype with features analogous to Skype-to-Skype and Skype-In. You just need to be able to "Talk out" - which you can do from the Gmail interface. Call and video quality are comparable as well.

Jingle needs clients on more platforms, but I can see it as a viable competitor to Skype.

Re:Sky .NET

[obarthelemy]

I think that's because of two reasons:
1- it's hard to make money while being open. Huge investments are required (development, hosting, deals with telcos...), and by definition you get no lock-in. I'm not sure how anyone can do all that, especially since most of those are up-front costs, and still hope to make money or at least convince investors to fund the start up. Few companies have the money without need for anyone (Google comes to mind)
2- proprietary does move faster. Apart from Google seeming to be able to move Android along quite fast, most other open specs lag behind their proprietary equivalents. And fragmentation is rife: HTML, Javascript, Linux... take forever to implement new stuff, and tend to do so in multiple, incompatible ways, that do plug the gap in the mean time, but tend to persist once the official spec is out.

There's a SIP client for my phone. I never could manage to get it to run (admittedly, I spent no more than 3hrs tring). Skype came pre-installed and Just Worked. I'd love for IM, video/audio calls to be "open"... I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Sky .NET

[BmlA]

Yeah, and how well does Google Voice work outside US?

Re:Sky .NET

[mortonda]

What does "normal people" mean here? I'm middle-aged and married with teenage kids. We own our house, cars, etc.

I think that refers to people who *don't* read slashdot. :D

Re:Sky .NET

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention this is a PERFECT example of why MSFT should NOT support Linux users! I mean here it is, the program works just fine, MSFT says they'll continue to support it, and what happens? "ZOMG teh M$ pwns it, we must switch NOW!"

I mean why the fuck should MSFT bother keeping the thing running, especially when Torvalds annual 6 month kernel screwing means you have to keep a cadre of developers working on NOTHING but keeping the Linux client going, when every Linux zealot is gonna be screaming from the rafters to have the thing removed?

In the end it is just another perfect example of why NO proprietary company should support Linux ever. Those that simply want an alternative OS have been pushing out by the zealots, who believe anything that isn't "free as in freedom and beer!" is the devil and must be destroyed. In the end you have a teeny tiny market controlled by zealots that have made it clear if MSFT gave away candy and beer they'd be standing by the cart throwing it into the ditch to keep anyone from being "poisoned" be teh evil M$, so why bother? That goes for Photoshop, games, hell anything that refuses to hand over any and all code, they simply don't want you there, so why waste the effort?

So I predict this will be a classic self fulfilling prophecy. The zealots will push for its banning and/or removal, it will require constant updating because from the kernel on up Linux shifts around more than any OS BAR NONE, and the Linux users, what few there were, will drop off the face of the earth, because they would rather deal with some half baked PITA mess of a "solution" rather than let ANYTHING owned by "M$" anywhere near their system, so MSFT will see the money is being pissed down a drain, quit supporting it, and all those like the Nichols troll (who is right up there with Thurott on the Windows side when it comes to trolling) will say "See? I TOLD YOU teh M$ would dump you!"

So enjoy throwing out something that works for a half baked royal PITA simply because its "free as in freedom!" Linux guys, but don't bitch when no proprietary company will touch you with a 50 foot pole, or that the "must haves" like Skype and Netflix won't run on your OS. You brought it upon yourselves.

Re:Sky .NET

[Confusador]

I just want to second this; I've been looking for a Skype replacement for about a year now, and the only thing I can find that will get me a softphone with a real number is Google Voice. While their web version works well, the lack of a client hurts. Even if I do find something that works, getting it to work with my phone sets (USB adapter) is going to be tough. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Re:Sky .NET

[digitig]

What we need to do is agree on a standard that can do all this: text messages, files transfers, audio calls, video calls, from one to multiple users for each of those.

Unfortunately it doesn't help if we agree a standard. We also need to get enough people using the standard for it to be a viable competitor to Microsoft. All the people I want to call abroad are on Skype and will stay on Skype unless they have a reason to move. And none of them consider "It's Microsoft" or "There is an alternative" to be a reason to move. They'll stick with what works for them.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "normal people" mean here? I'm middle-aged and married with teenage kids. We own our house, cars, etc.

I think that refers to people who *don't* read slashdot. :D

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who classify people into two kinds, and those who don't.

Re:Sky .NET

[frisket]

Not entirely. I have no need or desire to use Skype to call landlines or mobiles, or vice versa; but I do need to call other Skype users and they me, and to conference-call them.

What the developers have missed is that we need a single way to create a SIP ID, a single global directory, and a single global ID/addressing format. Until this is addressed, SIP is a dead duck.

Re:Sky .NET

[lvangool]

How exactly does being interconnected and generally friendly to your adjacent systems require you to be open? Skype is perfectly interconnected (it runs on everything) without being open.

Re:Sky .NET

[rcamans]

Wait a minute. A geek says he wants to use Skype? Oh, man, I just got an image of some geek mutant tard in his basement doing a Skype video call with anyone... GROSS.. (Shiver), Just the thought goes way past giving me the creeps, and the images that come to mind...
I am going to need years of therapy for that one.
Can you just imagine? SEEING slashdot regulars? Oh, man, we need fed regulation to limit nasty lookers/losers from using Skype video...

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, making them stick to one standard is important, can't force people to pay for anything nowadays due to too many alternatives. Sarcasm intended.

Diversity is good, no matter how much it sucks right now, it will be a blessing in the future.

Re:Sky .NET

[metamatic]

- Instant messaging doesn't work everywhere. AIM, MSN, ICQ, SMS... all incompatible. It's a mess.

Actually, things are moving in the right direction. Apple, Google, AOL and Facebook are all using XMPP. Yahoo and MSN are the two big holdouts.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

You expressed perfectly my view of the matter. I believe the very first post in the MS buys Skype story was "What's a good Skype alternative?" Slashdotters think MS will go back on their word that they will support Linux, but honestly if I were in charge over there I'd flat out say see you later, you bunch aren't worth it.

Re:Sky .NET

[ooloogi]

Exactly. Is this discussion US-centric in not mentioning SIP??? Here in Australia SIP seems very common right through to consumer use of VoIP, albeit mainly for calls to the PSTN. A lot of modems even include a SIP client and hardware for an analogue phone adapter. People generally don't seem to have trouble getting it to work behind NAT. I've had troubles in the past with Ekiga, but Twinkle has worked reliably for me to connect to my SIP provider.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not, but interconnectivity is a requirement for any solution which hopes to "win", or even to endure in the game.

Not true at all. The only requirement for any solution that hopes to win is market share - that's it. It doesn't have to interconnect with anything at all. It just needs to have market share. If you don't believe this, look at the very example we're talking about: Skype is a closed garden and yet, right now, it's dominant. All Skype needs to do in order to keep winning is to keep customers.

Re:Sky .NET

[hairyfeet]

Thank you! And notice how anyone who dares to not suckle the kool aid gets labeled troll or flamebait? As you pointed out the very first post and hundreds after it were "ZOMG dump Skype NOW!" and then the community has the unmitigated gall to bitch when proprietary companies won't support them? Why should they, when you treat them like lepers?

Frankly they can waste their mod points ALL THEY WANT but there is nothing i find more disgusting than hypocrites and right now the Linux community is overflowing with them. What do they say in many a post? "If proprietary companies would only support us too we would buy from them!" and then what do they do "ZOMG Its teh M$! They won't give uz teh codez and they will set trapz RUN AWAY!"

What did they say about hardware? "If the companies would release the code we would buy AND support them wholeheartedly!" So what happened when AMD actually did what the "community" asked and opened up every damned bit of code as fast as they could get the lawyers to sign off? "You should buy Intel and Nvidia if you run Linux" even though Nvidia ain't giving you shit and Intel has been going PowerVR which don't support Linux!

In the end while I can support (even if I don't agree with) RMS because the man has consistently walked the walk as well as talked the talk, frankly if the community were any more full of shit you could solve the energy crisis just by squeezing them! Lies, bullshit, hypocrisy, elitism and FUD, those words sum up the current community IMHO pretty damned well.

You expect the whole damned world to bend over backwards to accommodate you, even when the numbers aren't there to make it worth the effort, and then when a company DOES reach out, or do as you ask? You are more than happy to shit on them or buy from the competition who gives you the finger.

No damned wonder Linux is such a niche OS, with no support or retail presence, you go out of your way to ensure nobody wants anything to do with you! Now watch them waste mod points because they know my words are 100% correct. That is the thing about hypocrites, always ready to shit on others rather than take a good hard look in the mirror. But if after 20 years you have less users than JavaME? It is high time the community asks itself "What are we doing wrong?" and I'd say making sure no proprietary company will have a damned thing to do with your OS is a start.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

> - Instant messaging doesn't work everywhere. AIM, MSN, ICQ, SMS... all incompatible. It's a mess.

Pidgin works almost everywhere. With OTR for great and compatible encryption if you want.

Re:Sky .NET

[Trogre]

...(it runs on everything)...

Not for long I'm afraid.

Re:Sky .NET

[houstonbofh]

Like Ted Bundy? Perhaps you want a few more parameters...

Re:Sky .NET

[lvangool]

That's just speculation, AFIK based on the Silverlight video that was posted to the Skype website the morning the news was made public. As if Flash isn't every bit as closed as Silverlight, or as if HTML5 video is now universally compatible. For the moment, the "Skype will dump Linux" argument is FUD.

Re:Sky .NET

[M1FCJ]

Can you send a message from Google's XMPP servers to Facebook's XMMP servers? Last time I looked at it, although the protocol was the same, the servers were closed boxes.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype doesn't get past my firewall without permission. I don't have some default pussy firewall setup. Check the traffic a skype client uses too, it does a lot more that just make/receive calls.

Re:Sky .NET

[FireFury03]

Moving to IPv6 isn't a solution - it's not like everyone's going to run IPv6 without a firewall.

Removing NAT from the equation (which is inherent in moving to IPv6) _does_ make everything much easier. There is no requirement to run without a firewall or even poke holes in your firewall for inbound traffic - UDP firewall traversal is completely reliable if you're not going through a NAT. The reason why things get unreliable when NATs are involved is because the software has to make educated guesses about things like what IP address and port numbers the traffic is going to appear on once it exists the NAT, remove that problem from the equation and this stuff Just Works. (To be fair, SIP through a NAT usually Just Works these days anyway, but it is even more reliable once you dispense with NAT).

Re:Sky .NET

[FireFury03]

Can you send a message from Google's XMPP servers to Facebook's XMMP servers? Last time I looked at it, although the protocol was the same, the servers were closed boxes.

You can send messages from Google's XMPP servers to any XMPP server that supports s2s connections (i.e. practically all XMPP servers) and vice-versa. This has been true for years.

Unfortunately, Facebook's half-baked implementation doesn't support s2s, so is, indeed, a closed box. I will leave this to your imagination whether this is a strategic method of locking users in, or just that their developers did a half-arsed job (no idea why they insisted on writing their own implementation instead of using one of the readily available open ones mind you)

Re:Sky .NET

[FireFury03]

What the developers have missed is that we need a single way to create a SIP ID

Well you can't really have that any more than you can have a "single way of ordering a phone line" when there are multiple service providers. I guess SIP could introduce an account registration system like XMPP has so you can register accounts directly from your client, but is it really that hard to register on the service provider's website, like you do for most other services such as email?

a single global directory

I'm not sure how that would work - you really want a list of billions of people? When you want to phone Joe Bloggs, how are you going to identify which one, out of the 10,000 "Joe Bloggs" listed is the one you want?

On the whole, it sounds like a very bad idea to me - it is the perfect place for spammers to harvest addresses and this is exactly why email servers won't let you get a user list these days (despite it being part of the SMTP protocol). For other contact details (e.g. email, phone, etc), I'm pretty happy with maintaining my own address book of the people I actually talk to, and finding out the addresses of new contacts by talking to them, looking on their website, etc. and see no reason why I'd want to do anything different for VoIP.

Worth noting that despite the fact that a telephone directory is still distributed here in the UK (and available online), the majority of land-lines are ex-directory, it doesn't include mobile numbers and I certainly haven't actually *used* a telephone directory in at least 15 years because it is practically always easier to find someone's phone number a different way.

I do, however, think that it would be nice for SIP to provide access to (or at least, supply configuration data so your client can automatically access) your personal (and corporate-wide, for companies) address books rather than each client having to be configured to access whatever address book system you use.

and a single global ID/addressing format.

Err, you know SIP has always had a single addressing format don't you? It looks like an email address - sip:localpart@example.com, where "localpart" is something to identify you on the server (often your first.lastname). In fact, my SIP address is identical to my email address, so it makes it quite easy to remember.

Until this is addressed, SIP is a dead duck.

That would be a dead duck that's used by most modern telco networks, the vast majority of corporate phone networks and a significant number of home users. Mmmm.. sounds pretty dead to me.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought "real world" in GPP was ambiguous as to whether it meant POTS or "Joe Bloggs" - i.e. the average person who installs whichever VoIP product has the most brand recognition. With one exception, I've only used Skype for calling other Skype users, but if I install a VoIP package which isn't compatible with Skype I won't use it for calling anyone because no-one I know will have it.

Re:Sky .NET

[ProbablyJoe]

I don't think you understand the problem either. It's not a case of Linux users saying "I refuse to use an MS product!". Well, maybe some. But most of the ones with such strong ideologies would probably have stayed away from Skype in the first place, since it's never been at all open

The point is, that people who use Linux, regardless of their ideologies or opinions on free software, are worried that Skype will soon not be supported on Linux at all, then they'll have no choice but to find some other VoIP client to use

Re:Sky .NET

[m50d]

Yes, but it doesn't always work, or your router doesn't always support it. And in those cases, skype still works, where the open alternatives don't.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

"-Voice calls doesn't work everywhere. Skype, Google Voice... all incompatible. It's a mess."
Last I checked I could phone just about any phone in the world. With standards that are free as in freedom (but not as in beer). Only problems would be at upper layers with language protocol mismatches. So why did these VoIP things evolve? And what happens now that LTE essentially brings VoIP to every (old fashioned) telephone?

Probably nothing. Video calls were standardized and working also 10 years ago - yet there was a need for the new implementations.

Re:Sky .NET

[Dan541]

Video Calls on Mobile Phones is a standard.
Voice Calls on Phones is a standard.
SMS on Mobile Phones is a standard.

Jabber works a cross platform, you can run your own Jabber server for instant messaging.
IRC is also widely available, *nix users can use it from the command line. You can also run your own server.

Many VoIP systems are compatible with the telephone network, and each other.

Communication isn't as fragmented as people think; but more compatibility is always welcome.

Re:Sky .NET

[FireFury03]

How exactly does being interconnected and generally friendly to your adjacent systems require you to be open? Skype is perfectly interconnected (it runs on everything) without being open.

Depends what you mean by "interconnected". If you mean "runs on everything".. well, it runs on a lot of stuff but there is plenty that it doesn't run on for no reason other than they haven't developed the software for those platforms (and since it is a closed system, no one else can write the software either). If you mean "can make/receive calls to/from anything" then you're quite wrong. Skype can call PSTN numbers and Skype users but can't interoperate with SIP, XMPP, etc.

Re:Sky .NET

[andy.ruddock]

* Skype for Windows v5.3
* Skype for Linux v2.2-beta

I'd say that Skype's already dumped Linux.

Re:Sky .NET

[Malc]

Here's the current situation:
- Email works everywhere. There's no "Microsoft email vs Google email" problems. You have an email account, you can send and receive email from other users with an email account. It's all compatible, world-wide.

Actually that is sadly changing. Increasing amounts of people are sending me messages via Facebook, which isn't connected to email and doesn't provide nearly the same power and features of even the crappest MUA.

Re:Sky .NET

[lvangool]

I never said that it runs on literally anything, nor should that be expected. It's like expecting every gas station to offer power to charge electric vehicles or expecting a grocery shop to sell every brand. Skype pays for software development, you can't support all the marginal (in terms of value to Skype) protocols. Skype runs on Windows, Linux, iPhones and Android. I think they're doing fine on the interoperability front.

Re:Sky .NET

[crush]

- Instant messaging doesn't work everywhere. AIM, MSN, ICQ, SMS... all incompatible. It's a mess.

Google Talk just added the ability to message AIM (e.g. SMSAIM )users. So that's one incompatibility gone.

https://www.google.com/support/chat/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1281761

Re:Sky .NET

[Rysc]

Yes, this is a worrying trend. Already "Email" for most people has been replaced by "Facebook messages" which is fine except the client sucks, there's only one and it's all totally under control of that company. It seems like more and more "facebook apps" are being created that slurp up functionality that previously has been done on top of open protocols... and all because the integration and easy "installation" makes people like to use it.

One day there may be no email, usenet, IM, IRC, or anything else. It could all be HTTP traffic to one of a handful of service providers like facebook who then do everything internally and, like AOL of old, fight to keep users and developers inside their walled garden.

Re:Sky .NET

[walshy007]

I use skype for a bunch of things, not just skype-to-skype, but sending SMS, calling out to "real" phones, and last but not least skype-in. The latter feature means that I cannot get a substitute. So for now I keep using skype, if it disappears from Linux I will have to use it on a VM. It is a killer app, and it is worth all the 8.5 billion that MS paid for it (really much more useful than office).

Aside from sms which I have not tested personally so cannot confirm, asterisk using sip with a proper voip provider (to get the real phone number and be able to call regular phones) can do everything you are looking for. A friend of mine has his server set up as such that when the company number is rang you are presented with a menu for the person you wish to contact (depending on what you want of course) once selected all of the actual phones of the person you want ring, or their computer if signed in too (n95's are a very cheap source of a sip phone btw, but any modern smartphone is generally capable).

Does skype let you set up your own pbx that can forward things to any sip capable device?

I really fail to see the value in skype except for the whole 'granny can download and call people with no effort' sip is far more lovely to deal with for techies and more flexible.

Re:Sky .NET

[walshy007]

- Voice calls doesn't work everywhere. Skype, Google Voice... all incompatible. It's a mess.

There is a standard for voip, SIP. Voip providers give you a pstn number and you can use it to call regular phones and other sip providers without issue.

The real problem was simply everyone ignoring this and making their own stuff that is compatible.

What we need to do is agree on a standard that can do all this: text messages, files transfers, audio calls, video calls, from one to multiple users for each of those.

Transferring files over a voip protocol? eww. And how are you going to justify that when calling a plain old telephone service number? (which all of this integrates with). Again standards for transferring files have existed forever, the main issue is everyone _TRYING_ to lump all of those things together with their own unique mix of non-standard protocols.

Ironically xmpp has all of what you mentioned, but I would never use it for proper telephony, SIP is what all of the real telephone companies use and is the simplest and most effective thing for voip.

Re:Sky .NET

[walshy007]

mod parent up, similar experience.

Re:Sky .NET

[Jesus_666]

Remember that until recently, Skype for OS X was also stuck on version 2. Then we received version 5 and I immediately downgraded because any features Skype 5 may have don't outweigh the atrocious GUI. Still, they did start to deliver a new version.

Re:Sky .NET

[lwsimon]

I use Toktumi. My affiliate site here: http://mybusinesstollfreenumber.com/

I really do use it. My number is at the bottom of that site - feel free to give me a call.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Instant messaging was also standardized well before AIM, MSN, ICQ and SMS came along. It is called IRC

Moving to IPv6 isn't a solution - it's not like everyone's going to run IPv6 without a firewall. And convincing Joe Average to figure out how to configure their router to let IPv6 through for their SIP phone... not happening.

The one advantage IPv6 will provide is it will have many Joe Averages replacing whatever firewall they have. In the process they'll be getting rid of NAT, and this will mean letting SIP through will be much easier, perhaps even being sent out with the ports open.

Re:Sky .NET

[Vegemeister]

Silverlight video that was posted to the Skype website

And so it begins.

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

F*** the real world.

Re:Sky .NET

[Linuxmonger]

Here's the current situation: - Email works everywhere. There's no "Microsoft email vs Google email" problems. You have an email account, you can send and receive email from other users with an email account. It's all compatible, world-wide.

You don't seem to remember winmail.dat files or TNEF in general!

Re:Sky .NET

[DarwinSurvivor]

I'll give you most of that, but not Linux. Maybe linux *applications* lagg behind a bit (and only those with EXPENSIVE competition), but the os (and specifically the Kernel) are and always have been YEARS ahead of any proprietary options out there. Just look at USB3.0, journaling filesystems, remote management (ssh, remote-X), general execution speed, hardware compatibility (YOU try running windows-7 on a gumstick machine), ARM/64 bit support, etc.

Note: I would consider BSD to be even with Linux, and guess what, it's ALSO not proprietary.

Re:Sky .NET

[DarwinSurvivor]

In the real world, there are also times when only skype is feasible to one party, and a phone to the other. Due to the telecom's power (and size), the skype user (who's signal costs NOTHING to send internationally) is often the one charged long distance. What we need is a system where EVERYONE uses a SIP phone that simply connects to their provider of choice (SIP can be done over gsm, etc), but then the telcos wouldn't be able to "negotiate" absurd roaming charges with those in other countries. Government regulation, or the near UNIVERSAL adoption of sip is the only way we will be able to rid ourselves of this BS pricing imposed for sms, roaming and long distance, all of which cost telcos NOTHING other than pre-arranged "costs" with other telcos.

Re:Sky .NET

[DarwinSurvivor]

Now works in Canada (not sure about calling in, but out works), hopefully it will spread soon.

Re:Sky .NET

[DarwinSurvivor]

1) We aren't backing away from Skype because "A" proprietary company bought it, but because *Microsoft*, a company NOTORIOUS for screwing over linux users did. Had it been Toshiba, IBM, AutoDesk, NVIDIA, Intel, etc, we would be "Ok, cool, some new money is coming in". You may as well be complaining that people are worried about the child-molester that just moved in next to an elementary school. Yes, I just made that comparison, DEAL WITH IT!

2) The "linux API changing thing" is partly true, but mostly FUD. The api that software developers access is VERY constant, it's the hardware people that need to stay on their toes (drivers). This does NOT affect "chat client makers" as they simply access the *constant* api.

3) Most linux users couldn't care less if the software is open or free, given that it WORKS. Look at humble bundle, Linux users payed, on average, 1.8X more than Mac users and *3* times more than Windows users, so don't say Linux users aren't appreciative of software for their platform (fyi, most humble bunble games are NOT open source!)

4) The code AMD released was for OLD hardware, and we did thank them for that. Unfortunately the code was nearly useless for any of their NEW hardware and thus we COULDN'T support them because they don't see any money when we are forced to buy 2+ year old cards.

5) The reason people recommend NVIDIA is because their drivers (unlike AMD's current drivers), though closed, WORK when it comes to heavy 3D rendering!

Re:Sky .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't win this just because your application is "open".

What do you mean by win? Over what time course?

Most developers and users are constantly achieving significant endpoints through open protocols, standards, and software.

Re:Sky .NET

[Jonner]

I don't think Linux developers understand the problem. Once again. It's not about the technology underhood or that the protocol is open. The fact is these things need to be able to call to the "real world" and be able to receive calls from there. Basement geeks probably don't understand it, but that's what most normal people use Skype for. It will also need clients on tons of mobile phones AND it needs to be able to be used with Skype users. Now that Microsoft owns part of Facebook they will probably start using Skype too. You won't win this just because your application is "open".

There have been thousands of SIP gateways to allow calls to and from PSTN and cellular networks much longer than SkypeIn and SkypeOut existed. Skype did not succeed because of SkypeIn and SkypeOut, though that's how it's making money. By my observation, most still use Skype to connect to other Skype users. It succeeded because it made that easy. There are existing open protocols such as SIP and Jingle that can be used just as successfully as Skype, but there hasn't been a single cross-platform implementation that makes that easy and has the awareness of Skype, which has marketing behind it. I haven't tried implementations of the open protocols recently, so there may be a good Skype replacement we can all get behind.

Also,

Already Neglected...

[steevven1]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have always felt neglected as a Linux Skype user. The Linux version of Skype has perpetually been in beta, and it has always had less features than its Windows counterpart.

Re:Already Neglected...

[man_of_mr_e]

That's, in large part, the fault of Linux not having a lot of standard features that Windows and Mac have. By that, I mean there are 20 competing technologies for things that are standard on Windows or Mac.

The fact that you can replace your GUI with something else is great, from an end user perspective.. but terrible from a developer perspective. You have to have a base set of features you can rely on, and LSB isnt' anywhere close to that. Take, for example, desktop compositing. This is something that a developer can count on to be there, and have a single API, both in Windows and MacOS. In Linux, it might or might not be there, and if it is there, there might bet half a dozen different API's.

You might say "That's what dependancies are for", but many things are mutually exclusive. If you already have Beryl installed, then having a Compiz dependancy is pointless.

Re:Already Neglected...

[dr.newton]

I have felt the same way, but I think it's a blessing.

On linux, the UI has remained simple and usable, whereas on other platforms everyone gets to be guinea pigs in the develoers' horrible window-management experiments, and cruel abuse of white space.

Re:Already Neglected...

[houstonbofh]

I was going to say the same thing. What features am I missing? The big page of adds?

Re:Already Neglected...

[oakgrove]

The fact that you can replace your GUI with something else is great, from an end user perspective.. but terrible from a developer perspective.

How so? I can write my app with GTK or Qt and as far as what "GUI" someone is using, it will work on 99.9 percent of Linux desktops. If it doesn't, it's because that person really doesn't want it to work.

Take, for example, desktop compositing. In Linux, it might or might not be there, and if it is there, there might bet half a dozen different API's.

What are you talking about and pray tell what way does this impact me as a developer? Are you saying I need to interact directly with the compositing engine? Because I don't. That's absurd unless I'm specifically targeting that with my application. Are you confused?

Beryl

is installed on nobody's computer as of several years ago when it merged into Compiz. Your points amount to nothing more than "I don't like Linux" handwaving.

Re:Already Neglected...

[imroy]

Yeah, but even worse is the Android version - it doesn't even receive/play video in a video call!

Re:Already Neglected...

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Well i have had zero problems, and my window user friends didn't notice any missing features. In fact they were kinda surprised by how easily I added the web cam. Plug in out of the box, click on skypes setup thingy, web cam working. Several of my friends had to use the cams drivers to get it too work under windows.

YMMV but overall lately(5+years) I have been getting very very good mileage on my Linux installs.

Re:Already Neglected...

[man_of_mr_e]

Your one-track mind is limiting your comprehension.

Your argument is basically "Nobody would want to target a specific gui" when in fact, if there was only a single GUI people would be writing apps that target it. It's the lack of a single gui that prevents those kinds of apps (or at least makes it much more difficult).

Yes, some apps do in fact target the compositing engine. For example, plug-ins for the compositing engine. They have to be written specifically for that engine, be it XGL, Beryl, Compiz, KWin, etc.. Yes, Beryl may be old, that doesn't mean nobody is using it.

As an example, take a look at Unity, which is written as a plugin to Compiz. If you're not running Compiz, you can't run Unity (Well, you could run Unity 2D, but it's really a different thing). So if you're running KWin, Mutter, or Metacity, you can't use Unity.

Re:Already Neglected...

[oakgrove]

Your argument is basically "Nobody would want to target a specific gui" when in fact, if there was only a single GUI people would be writing apps that target it. It's the lack of a single gui that prevents those kinds of apps (or at least makes it much more difficult).

Are you fucking retarded? The "GUI" (btw, what the fuck are you talking about? Widget toolkit? Not a programmer much, fucktard?) is irrelevant to how you write your applications. You pick a toolkit and you write your application. Kind of like on Windows, you can use tkinter, gtk+, Qt or whatever you want. They all work equally well on any desktop. It's really a question of which one you are most comfortable with. Every platform has multiple toolkits you can use. Windows, OSX, Linux, fucking OS/2, all of them. You don't even make sense.

Yes, some apps do in fact target the compositing engine. For example, plug-ins for the compositing engine.

Really, numbnuts? Plugins written for a particular program only work on that program? No shit. Firefox plugins only work on...drum roll...Firefox. What is your point? That you are an idiot? I get it.

So, my question for you is this. Did your mom go to have an abortion and just change her mind after a third of your brains had been sucked out? Because, then you might have an excuse.

Do we really need it?

[mogul]

As the introvert geeks we are, do we really need it at all?

Re:Do we really need it?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

As the introvert geeks we are, do we really need it at all?

Do you use Linux for work? Remote work?

Re:Do we really need it?

[hedwards]

That was my thought, I'm not sure where I'm going to be working next, but it's definitely possible that my next job will involve the use of skype on a regular basis. In my personal life I rarely use the phone for actual talking, usually it's checking the email, looking up information or texting, but I do have voice service and use it from time to time.

Re:Do we really need it?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'm working at a place where I have to co-ordinate with somebody in another state. We're using Skype and here's a few reasons: (note: It is not my intention to imply that these features are exclusive to Skype.)

- Video chat- We do communicate a little better when it's more face-to-face than over the phone or via text. It does audio or just plain text chat, too.
- Screen sharing- We can show each other what's going on on our desktops, lots of what we do is visual so that helps.
- File xfers
- Clients for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and all the features still work- I've heard it works on Android too but I personally have not seen that.
- No Firewall BS
- Encryption- Supposedly the Skype connection is all encrypted, including with file x-fers. That makes our overlords happy.

Hopefully this clarifies why I asked about remote access.

Re:Do we really need it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you can do file transfers with regular phones, too. It's called zmodem.

Re:Do we really need it?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What?

Re:Do we really need it?

[Xiph1980]

Yes, and it's completely possible to drive from New York City to Philadelphia via Seattle, but why would you.

Everything was said here before.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article seems to be a Readers Digest of the /. discussion we had here when MS bought Skype. OK, there is some cool technology available, but none of my contacts uses anything compatible to it.

5 Alternatives nobody but /. has heard of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Facetime. SRSLY BRAHS.

You can laugh now, but Apple's going to release it as an "open spec". And it's actually going to be interoperable across multiple platforms.

And it has a shot in hell of being interoperable with Skype (& Facebook, if rumors have any truth).

Say what you like about Apple's "walled gardens," but remember that they're also the ones who drew the line on Flash, and have been pushing HTML5 as an alternative.

None exist.

[Manip]

The entire VoIP/video chat market is a cesspool of junk. I'm talking about all platforms, all manufacturers. Skype is the "least bad" of the very few even notable pieces of software. However, let's not pretend Skype wasn't terrible in every incarnation except the Windows client, and even then still buggy or poorly designed.

The current Skype client for iOS, Android, and Linux sucks. The current OS X client is very poor. The Windows client works most of the time at least until the next software update and then all bets are off.

So what does that leave us with? Live Messenger? Facetime? Neato.

Please be quiet about Google Talk. It doesn't support 1/16th of Skype's vital features, and it doesn't even support video in the desktop client. Plus the few telephone options it does have are US only.

I'd love to see this market seriously shaken up. I want to see massively better business apps that can replace your entire Cisco telephone system, and personal apps which make the teenage girls drool (since I assume that is what Live Messenger is aimed at).

Re:None exist.

[muuh-gnu]

> It doesn't support 1/16th of Skype's vital features, and it doesn't even support video in the desktop client.

I never undestood why Google from the beginning refused to build video into the client. As I remember, the party line back then was that video was "bloat", and that they did want the GTalk client to remain "simple". And it remained half-assed. And then they gave up any further work on it. No video, no Linux/Mac versions, no conference mode, nothing. Half a decade passed and all they had to offer wasa a half-assed, non-competitive windows-only client. For how much they neglected their own telephony during the last 6 years, I would have been more surprised if Google ended up buying Skype instead of Microsoft.

Re:None exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

make the teenage girls drool (since I assume that is what Live Messenger is aimed at).

How did you know I named my cock "Live Messenger"?

Re:None exist.

[pherthyl]

>> The current Skype client for iOS, Android, and Linux sucks. The current OS X client is very poor.

Skype for iOS works great. What do you want? Skype for Linux is a bit clunky, but not bad considering how small that market is and the fragmentation. Same goes for Android (fragmentation making development difficult).
The OSX client works great. The 5.x series is essentially up to par with the Windows client.

Re:None exist.

[BiggyMcLargeHuge]

dude... what color is the sky in your world? My family uses skype constantly on a variety of machines without any issues. A few linux machines, several macs, and the rest windows all work together flawlessly.. so I have no idea what cesspool you're wading around in, but over here, everything is hunky-dory and hey.. it's free.

Re:None exist.

[SuperQ]

http://www.google.com/chat/video

Best part is it you can voice/video chat with non-google users including non-google jabber servers with Empathy

http://live.gnome.org/Empathy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)

Re:None exist.

[Fred Ferrigno]

Gmail chat supports video on the desktop via a browser plug-in, even in Linux. If you have some aversion to using your browser as a client, Pidgin nominally supports video calls over Google Talk, although it causes a crash in my admittedly outdated version of Pidgin.

Re:None exist.

[nschubach]

Not affiliated with this site, but I find it handy at times:
  http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/?profile=linux&platform=linux&exactmatch=true

Re:None exist.

[frisket]

The entire VoIP/video chat market is a cesspool of junk.

Amen.

I had a Nokia N800 a coupla years ago (wonderful machine, pity Nokia screwed it up), and I ran Gizmo, got myself a Gizmo ID, even paid for some external call connectivity (first and last time I ever needed to). I also installed Gizmo on my laptop and desktop.

Crap all round. Dire interface. Crackly, stuttering voice no matter how good the bandwidth. As others have said, the reason people use Skype is it works.

Re:None exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype windows client works great, every time. Haven't had any problem with any software update. I use all the features of Skype including having my own Skype number. I set the area code to where my family is located and setup skype to forward to whichever phone number I am at depending on where in the world I am. That way, they can make a free local call (some of them still have land lines) and I end up paying a very cheap per minute rate (as opposed to the typical international roaming charges).

Re:None exist.

[defaria]

"1/16th of Skype's *vital features"??? It does phone calls and video works for me. What are these other *vital* features you speak of? You mean like the girls from Ghana who keep popping up in Skype trying to scam me? No thanks!

Re:None exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

my mom in vancouver canada and uses a mac. I live in hong kong and am using an android handset. She video calls on google talk regularly now. I'm using a google nexus s with the latest over the air upgrade. All free and very cool

Re:None exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Skype on Linux for some time, and I have had 0 problems with it. It even works with my bluetooth headset, and the webcam integrated into my laptop.

MS linux support

[synapse7]

Does Microsoft currently support any products that run natively in linux?

Re:MS linux support

[BmlA]

Why would they? Linux users aren't exactly the best customers - they want everything for free and even still they bitch about everything.

Re:MS linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several on the enterprise level vas (quest authentication services), system manager, very little on the end user level though.

Re:MS linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS?

Re:MS linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS runs natively IN Linux? I guess if you mean a VM, all on x86 architecture. But then, anything runs "natively" in anything on x86 by that definition.

Re:MS linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to Windows users who just steal it or just use the nag-ware version in perpetuity.

If MS can't make money off of Skype, and they won't, it'll just become part of the Windows distribution. The 21st century Outlook.

Re:MS linux support

[icebraining]

Except when they voluntarily pay more than Windows users for the one of the few decent, paid applications that run on both.

Re:MS linux support

[pmontra]

Well, I'm a Linux user and I paid money to Skype to be able to call and receive calls from landlines and mobile phones.

Re:MS linux support

[hairyfeet]

If you can't see how MSFT is gonna make boatloads of cash off of Skype then you must be blind. They'll turn it into THE must have WinServer all in one for managing employee phones. You'll be able to give them a Nokia WinPhone with Skype, have it route to wherever they are on the planet, all for a single low rate, be able to manage the whole thing with GPOs through AD, businesses will snatch it up!

The words you need to be thinking of AC is "vertical integration" which MSFT is finally wising up to. You'll see WinPhone, Skype, Windows 7, and the X360 ALL play nice together and integrate in a nice "it just works" kinda way,

It along with the Nokia deal were smart moves (unlike Ballmer's crazy "Hey lets buy Yahoo!" idea) that with one move let them kick start their mobile division and give them a way to tie everything together all nice and neat, in a way that both home users and business users won't have any problems buying, either as part of the OS or hardware on the home side, and as part of a service contract on the business side. Its a smart move any way you look at it.

Re:MS linux support

[houstonbofh]

The Humble Inde Bundle proves you wrong. Three time in a row...

Re:MS linux support

[QuantumRiff]

SMTP, but not in the first few releases of Exchange :)

Re:MS linux support

[shutdown -p now]

Yes (it even mentions Linux on the page). Though the definition of "native" in this case is arguable.

Here is another thing.

When will peaple learn ....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323
If we are going to ignore all these standards we might as well box IETF ...
ALSO: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2141282&cid=36082128

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[man_of_mr_e]

SIP and H.323 are fine, but they are only part of the issue. Codec's are a huge problem. The free (as in no license required) codecs are bandwidth hungry.

The real issue though, is one of configuration. Using a strict SIP or H.323 client means the user has to understand issues like addressing, ports, etc.. This is fine for geeks, but end users want a point and click, it's done kind of system. That means having a central service that not only provides default configurations and service, but address books, and more importantly, doesn't allow just anyone to connect and voice spam the shit out of them.

Open systems are prone to spam, closed systems have a lot more control over that. That is, most likely, why Google voice doesn't allow sip connections (they did at first, then turned it off).

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when will people learn: Don't put network addresses inside the data streams. FTP still exists as a brutal example of what not to do, but SIP makes all the same mistakes and then some. If you are familiar with the intricacies of ISDN, H.232 might look sane, but nobody else will touch it. When everybody else fails so completely, then there's plenty room for a proprietary protocol implemented by a closed source software: Skype.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft makes Skype unviable for many people and the pressure to create a true substitute will result in an open protocol that isn't designed by morons.

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[Simon80]

In my experience, the codecs are fine. The NAT stuff is definitely still an issue for the average user, but it's one that can be solved. I think it would have been solved satisfactorily by open SIP clients by now, except that support certain badly NATed clients, you need to proxy calls through a server (or a P2P protocol), which is a more open-ended problem than just included protocol support in your client.

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[man_of_mr_e]

The reason NAT is a problem is that SIP embeds IP and port information into the protocol. This means the firewall has to change those values and be SIP aware, or you need a client that plays tricks like using Stun. Either way, this is stuff that most clients need to have configured.

And the codecs are not fine. G.729 requires a paid for license to legally use. H.264 is the same.

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[FireFury03]

SIP and H.323 are fine, but they are only part of the issue. Codec's are a huge problem. The free (as in no license required) codecs are bandwidth hungry.

Some of the commercial codecs are better, but Speex, GSM codecs and AMR-NB are fine for most people. Also, I suspect that most people wouldn't care even if they were using G.711 - 64Kbps in each direction is tiny compared to most things people use their internet connections for.

The real issue though, is one of configuration. Using a strict SIP or H.323 client means the user has to understand issues like addressing, ports, etc..

How so? Usually it is simply a case of entering your username, password and the address of your service provider's SIP registration server. The only thing different to Skype here is that you don't need to enter the server address for Skype (but you can't allow for multiple service providers any other way, so if you want choice of service provider, thats what you're stuck with, just like email).

NAT *usually* isn't a problem (most clients are preconfigured to use STUN so no user fiddling needed here), although it is certainly nicer to avoid it where possible.

That means having a central service that not only provides default configurations and service

Some service providers ship clients preconfigured. For example, if you create an account on SIPgate then they present you with a preconfigured copy of X-Lite to download and any hardware you buy from their shop will be preconfigured with your account details before they ship it to you, making it pretty much plug-in-and-go.

but address books, and more importantly, doesn't allow just anyone to connect and voice spam the shit out of them.

I must admit I'd like to see an XMPP-style roster in SIP. However, most SIP clients do integrate with address books. e.g. Ekiga integrates with Evolution, Telephone integrates with the OS X address book, SIPDroid integrates with the Android contacts system, etc. It would, however, but nice to see some widely implemented open standards for address books (this applies to everything that uses address books, such as email, etc too) instead of applications being tied into specific address book systems.

Open systems are prone to spam, closed systems have a lot more control over that.

I'm not convinced about that... I've heard Skype users complaining about spam (I've not used Skype myself so can't really comment) but I don't get any spam calls to my SIP accounts. This is, of course, not down to anything particularly technological, probably just that it is harder to spam a decentralised system like SIP which has no central user database, etc.

I do see quite a lot of brute-force password attempts on my SIP servers, much like you see on ssh servers, etc. but due to reasonably secure passwords they never get anywhere and I have fail2ban configured to dump clients who make too many registration attempts (note, this is specific to running a SIP server, not a client, sop wouldn't affect Skype users anyway). I also see a lot of attempts to make unauthenticated PSTN calls, presumably attackers hoping the server is misconfigured and would allow them to do so (it won't). Again, fail2ban is configured to put a stop to this.

In the end, much like other communication systems such as IM, Email and even the PSTN, all VoIP systems are going to be susceptible to spam and there is very little to be done about it. I do feel that I am in a better position to filter spam from my own servers than relying on Skype to do it for me though (subjective).

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[Simon80]

Well, I don't know who thought it was a good idea to duplicate info like IP and port, but I've been using SIP for my own phone service for years, and G.711 works fine, so there's actually no need to use G.729. I'm sure there are some people on 56k or something where it actually makes a difference, but for your average broadband user, G.711 is fine. There's also Codec 2, Opus, which had outstanding performance on what looks like a pretty rigorous listening test, and of course, Speex, but uptake is an issue for those, of course, since both ends have to support the codec.

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[man_of_mr_e]

G.711 is terrible for a lot of reasons. Because it needs 64Kb of bandwidth, that means it's more susceptible to packet loss (UDP) and it requires more packets so latency becomes an issue. If you're calling someone in Bangladesh or Chile then you can see latencies as much as 500ms. That's not even counting people who might be on Satellite internet, or wireless (in many mountainous 3rd world countries they gave up trying to lay cables, and people use wireless systems like WiMax and other proprietary formats).

Most of the other codecs you mention are not supported by most VOIP services, and even if they are, would require transcoding because most physical IP Phones won't support them.

Seriously, not everyone has great broadband.

Re:When will peaple learn ....

[Simon80]

Ok, but what I'm saying is that if you're on anything better than 56k, none of that is a problem, and that's probably the vast majority of Skype's userbase, and the vast majority of people here. There aren't any barriers stopping service providers from simply adding support for Speex or Codec 2 for those low-bandwidth users, either, and if they're not calling the PSTN, then it's much more likely that both ends would at least support Speex.

There are no true alternatives

[PARENA]

I work from home, in another country, at 1500 kilometers distance from my colleagues. Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux. Or ask my relatives who also live that far away, to do that. But somehow I don't see it happening...

Re:There are no true alternatives

[losinggeneration]

You misunderstand the technologies at play here. It's not that other clients are incompatible with Skype, it's that Skype decided to turn its nose to the standards already established to effectively lock in users. Obviously it worked. If they were using standard SIP technologies this would be almost no story here.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[b0bby]

But if they used standard SIP technologies they wouldn't be where they are, because people would be having problems getting through their NAT routers. Skype took off because they made it easy to set up; SIP just doesn't have that.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[pz]

I work from home, in another country, at 1500 kilometers distance from my colleagues. Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux. Or ask my relatives who also live that far away, to do that. But somehow I don't see it happening...

I have a secondary, small desktop box specifically for applications where a Windows environment is required, like your situation: Skype, MS Office Suite, Adobe Acrobat Pro (the real deal, not the reader), MSIE for any web site that seems to be behaving oddly with FF on Linux (including 99.5% of my bureaucratic overhead), etc. My primary workhorse is a Linux box, but because of job-related issues, I am inescapably tied to the Windows experience.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[PARENA]

But it is a bit of a story for exactly the reason I put there. How are the few Linux users going to interact with "99.99%" of the Skypers out there that use Windows if Microsoft does decide to drop Linux/Mac support? It's lovely that there are "plenty" of applications that run on Linux and use SIP, but that doesn't help me get into touch with all those Skype users. Another concern would be the Skype API. Right now, I have Skype running but I hide everything (thank you KDE, for making this possible). Kopete has a plugin that can (if I got that right) 'intercept' the Skype chat windows. The windows still exist, I just don't see them thanks to kwin and such. Also, Kopete lets me use Skype's audio (and video I believe, but never use it) chats. So, I use a jabber server, my google talk and skype all from Kopete. I'm betting that if they do put some effort in a Linux client, they won't care about that API and I'll end up really having to use 2 programs again. Which with Skype for linux is a pain as it doesn't have tabbed chat windows. >_ Well, let's see what happens over the next few months. Hasn't taken MS very long to take the already failing Nokia to a new low point, see how fast this will go with Skype (for Linux).

Re:There are no true alternatives

[cyber-vandal]

Nokia is failing in the same way as Microsoft is failing. They're having trouble keeping up with nimbler rivals but they are still immensely profitable. Just because they're not doing well in the US market doesn't mean they're about to go bust. Far from it.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[PARENA]

Actually, I only needed IE every now and then before. I have (insanely enough) 3 virtualbox environments: XP+IE7, XP+IE8 and WIN7+IE8 which will become IE9. However, as my job has changed from web developing to quality assurance, I start up VirtualBox rarely anymore. Don't need MS Office (document distribution within our company is usually PDF and I personally use ODF and not getting complaints as I don't have to deal with clients). So for me it's fine at this point. And I have the Skype 2.2 RPM put aside safely, but if MS changes stuff too much (or stops supporting Linux at all), that RPM is going to stop working at some point. My next machine (please loud obnoxious huge midi tower desktop machine, STOP WORKING!) will be a 15.6" laptop which I will use as the secondary screen, I guess, using my 22" inch monitor as the primary screen. But it looks like having to run virtualbox just for skype at some point if the proverbial shit hits the fan.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[PARENA]

I know they don't do well over there, never have. However, this Dutch news article: http://www.nu.nl/internet/2518951/nokia-ziet-marktaandeel-verder-krimpen.html says Nokia's market share is now down to 25%, the lowest since 1997. 30.6% a year ago. Symbian? 27.4% and in 2010 that was 44.2%. Well, with Windows Phone or whatever it's called, everything will improve. MS last year: 6.8% and now 3.6%. I so loved my Nokias ever since my first one in 1999, never bought any other after that. Except now, I have my Android phone.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[pmontra]

I agree that those programs are no true alternatives, not until all my customers, my coworkers and my friends start using them. They'll stick to Skype and so must I. If they'll stop developing the Linux client and make the current one incompatible with the other ones I might even have to buy a Windows netbook only for it. At least I'll test web apps with IE9 outside a VM. I guess I'll become a heavy user of Synergy

By the way, I definitively switched to Linux at the time of Skype 4, with that big bad full screen interface and I don't know if things went for the worse or for the better since then. The Linux client looks like the old minimalistic Windows interface and has a better feeling. It's a matter of personal tastes.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I hate to say it, but SIP works fine for my desktop sip phone in a static, arranged situation. I couldn't imagine trying to make sip work as an "always just works" video chat client.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[Eskarel]

Nokia are and were failing because Symbian is a steaming pile of horse shit. It's slow, buggy, feature poor and generally an abomination. They made great simple phones and still do, but their smart phone line is awful. Symbian 60 phones aren't as powerful or reliable or feature rich as the iOS,Android,WIn7 phones and they're not as simple or reliable as Nokia's old phones. The only reason they sell at all is that they're a third of the price of their competition. The company was mismanaged, the code base was mismanaged and they fell for the sunk costs fallacy and held onto a dog of an operating system for far too long. If Meego had come out before Android and actually appeard on more than a couple of phones there might not be an android phone, but it didn't do either of those things so it's a case of too little too late.

I don't know if Microsoft is going to be able to do anything positive for Nokia, but they were heading to bankruptcy before the deal so there's not much they can do to make them worse.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[adamofgreyskull]

You misunderstand the technologies at play here.

Did you respond to the wrong post? What evidence is there that he doesn't "understand the technologies at play here"? What he's saying is a perfectly valid reason why he can't use any of the "alternatives" and that reason has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with the fact that his company has standardised on Skype, and because his relatives, on the other side of the world use Skype. Skype is synonymous with "video chat"/"internet telephony" for all the non-technical people I know and it has such critical mass that suggesting that they download a new client just so they can talk to you is going to get you funny looks.

So, if you want to talk to your family (he does) and if you need to talk to your work colleagues (he does) and they use Skype, there are no alternatives. The "why", which you are keen to discuss and which the GP didn't even allude to, is unimportant.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[losinggeneration]

What evidence is there that he doesn't "understand the technologies at play here"?

I was referencing this sentence: "Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux" Which is backwards because Skype is the incompatible one, not the other way around.

The "why", which you are keen to discuss and which the GP didn't even allude to, is unimportant.

For anyone who actually cares about open standards, it is important to point out the distinction I made. I just perhaps was a bit too harsh on PARENA at the time.

With respect to PARENA, it does indeed look like he's quite knowledgeable (based on his reply to me), but used a slightly poor word choice IMO.

Re:There are no true alternatives

[cyber-vandal]

Failing to me means making a loss, not selling enough products, about to go out of business. It does not mean 'has more and better competition than it used to'. They're struggling for sure but they still made several hundred million euros last year. A lot of companies would love to be 'failing' like that.

Apple's Facetime

[Anonymous Coward]

The FaceTime protocol is partly based on numerous open industry standards.

And yes, that includes H.264 and AAC. Whole industries are based on these standards, just get a cash pool going, get the damn required licenses and get with the program already.

Re:Apple's Facetime

[bill_mcgonigle]

The FaceTime protocol is partly based on numerous open industry standards.

And yes, that includes H.264 and AAC. Whole industries are based on these standards, just get a cash pool going, get the damn required licenses and get with the program already.

As does Google's which is based on XMPP. But without the patent hassle.

Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[Metabolife]

Does anyone know of any good free video conferencing software for Windows? Skype recently decided to charge for video chatting with more than one person at time.

Re:Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know of any good free video conferencing software for Windows? Skype recently decided to charge for video chatting with more than one person at time.

Oovoo allows for up to three people for free I think. Beyond that, it is also a charge.

Re:Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.officesip.com/

Still a work in progress though

Re:Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know of any good free video conferencing software for Windows? Skype recently decided to charge for video chatting with more than one person at time.

QQ, it is great.

Re:Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[asvravi]

Win+R -> conf.exe

Re:Off-topic: Windows Video Client

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no good, free video chat solutions. Sorry.
There are paid video chat solutions and sucky free video chat solutions.

WebEx
GoToMeeting
BigBlueButton
TinyChat

Area a few examples. They all suck in some way.

Doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care what it does and what program is best.

If my friends and colleagues are on network A, I need to be on network A. I don't want B, C, D, or some client that can go on B and D together. I need A.
A Skype replacement either needs to connect to the Skype network, or it needs to somehow switch everyone else to use it.

amsn

[Anonymous Coward]

amsn...

Pick up the phone...

[Aphrika]

Established technology, not tied down to a single manufacturer, large user base, mobile and desktop clients exist...

Re:Pick up the phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

And audio technology dating back to when my grandparents were kids. The audio quality of the legacy phone system is miserable. I'll take Skype for the sound quality any day.

Re:Pick up the phone...

[jedidiah]

Precisely. The use cases for which VOIP makes more sense than a conventional land line are vanishingly small.

Skype does have some advantages over conventional operators in certain niche areas where Skype can be more price competitive.

Re:Pick up the phone...

[Asic Eng]

Established technology, not tied down to a single manufacturer, large user base, mobile and desktop clients exist...

No video chat and international calls cost a fortune. It's great as long as you don't want any of Skype's benefits.

right on

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah! Bout Time

And anther street shill drives trafic to a adsite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Step right up ladies and gents, see the show, only a pence. Please, please click on an ad.
I've given up trying to adblock all the crap on the site hosting this article. Thats 87 blocked items. And that doesn't include the annoying carousel.

Empathy and Google Talk / Chat / Voice

[tchernobog]

The only downside is that there isn't a client for this. Instead, Linux and Mac users need to install a Google Talk video and voice plug-in to their Web browsers.

Actually, this is not entirely true. I've managed to get my Skype account deleted definitively exactly today, but I'm using Empathy 3.x since a couple of weeks to make daily voice and video calls. Video is actually a bit shakey, but voice is okay. This is for the on-line VoIP part. There have been pointers that Empathy might be estended to support landline calls too, it's just matter of time.

Re:Empathy and Google Talk / Chat / Voice

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do VOIP (also called SIP) calls. Install the telepathy-sofiasip package and you are set!

Re:Empathy and Google Talk / Chat / Voice

[frisket]

Video on Linux is an utter disaster. It used to work fine, but recent changes to Flash mean virtually nothing works any more, and I haven't found any other applications which work with any of the common cameras. I can see other people, but no camera I can find works. I have no idea what the developers have done to the drivers (or more likely, failed to do), but it needs to be fixed.

Re:Empathy and Google Talk / Chat / Voice

[hitmark]

flash changes should have no effect on the driver side of things.

Re:Empathy and Google Talk / Chat / Voice

[Kagetsuki]

Look up "Flash-Aid". A lot of distros try to package flash in a funny way and end up leaving things behind during upgrades. Especially if you also install AIR. Particularly the Ubuntu Flash package is a terrible hack - you're better off grabbing the .deb directly form Adobe. But really, the Flash-Aid generated script will fix your flash problems in one shot and it's no hassle.

Ekiga? Don't make me laugh.

[cos(0)]

With a heavy heart I have to say that Ekiga is a piece of junk. I say this without any exaggeration.

For a while I've been trying to avoid Skype and get my family to use Ekiga. (My family already runs Linux.)

I've been trying to get Ekiga to work in various environments for at least three years. I've tried on two Linux end-points, two Windows end-points, and mixed. It works maybe 10% of the time -- and even then, not for long. Other times, the two participants cannot see each other online -- or can, yet cannot send messages to each other. When one side calls the other, the call looks like it's going but nothing happens on the receiver's end. Or, it immediately resets on the sender's end.

The biggest public argument against Ekiga -- lack of interoperability -- was never an issue for me! My family was ready and eager to use the latest (2.x, later 3.x) Ekiga. Yet my diehard open-source ways greatly failed this time.

Yes, both sides are behind NAT. That's the way of life. Skype works on today's Internet; Ekiga doesn't. End of story.

Re:Ekiga? Don't make me laugh.

[grumbel]

Same here, I haven't tried Ekiga in a while, but when I tried it, it always was kind of garbage, hard to setup, didn't work half the time and when it would worked the sound quality was awful. The only good voice chat thing I have seen so far on Linux is Mumble, the sound quality is amazing, you can have conferences with multiple people, etc. It is a fantastic tool, the only big show stopper with it is that it is more IRC with voice then it is a Skype replacement, so setup and use isn't exactly easy.

Re:Ekiga? Don't make me laugh.

[Bryan3000000]

Apparently Ekiga uses a NAT traversal method that is not recommended and has proven not very robust. Most likely that is the issue. I've been looking at Jitsi, which used to be SIP Communicator, and it seems solid.

Re:Ekiga? Don't make me laugh.

[gosand]

Agreed. I tried to use Ekiga when I was on business trips to talk to my family. I'd boot up on a livecd (couldn't install on company hardware), install it, and try calling home.... video wouldn't work.. or audio wouldn't work... or both. I never once got it to work right. I gave up. I bit the bullet, and installed Skype. It works.

My parents and family across the country installed it... it works. We can video chat with them. They love it, the kids love it.

And if I may... how about we come up with some decent frickin' names? I know how to pronounce Skype by looking at it, and hear people saying "I'll Skype you later". Try saying "I'll Ekiga you later" It may seem like a small thing - but it's really kind of a big deal. Pidgin, gkrellm, Ekiga, K3b, Kdenlive, Geeqie, LibreOffice, and the list goes on and on. It's kind of ok when it's in the Linux world (like some of my examples), but once it's outside of that, it seems kind of lame. And lame doesn't sell, even if it's free.

Re:Ekiga? Don't make me laugh.

[wrook]

There are many SIP clients that are better than Ekiga. I have never gotten Ekiga to work and I definitely know what I'm doing (implementing SIP software used to be my job). I use Twinkle. It's ugly as sin, but it works.

When both sides are behind NAT, you may get one way audio, depending on the router that's doing the NAT. This is a problem with the router and even STUN won't solve the problem (ICMP packets bind the port, so if you receive a packet before you send one, your network facing port number will change on you). Skype fixes this problem by making clients that aren't behind NAT forward voice packets for clients that are behind NAT. So if you are using Skype and you aren't behind NAT, you may be acting as a proxy for other people's calls.

If you want to get this to work using free software end to end, you will have to either have routers that don't have the ICMP problem (in which case using STUN will traverse the NAT properly) or you will have to put a proxy in the middle that isn't behind NAT (an Asterisk server works well). That's what I do, but a lot of people don't have the opportunity to run a server outside of NAT. In this case, I recommend using Google Voice and one of the various free software Jingle clients (I think Pidgin will work...). Of course, this is using Google as a proxy. I *think* you should also be able to run a Jabber server and open the proper ports on your router and talk using Jingle, but I haven't tried it behind NAT yet (not sure if it uses multiple ports like SIP).

Anyway, there *are* options, but they require some investigation and/or technical expertise. We still don't have an easy non-tech solution like Skype.

Useless

[IgnoramusMaximus]

All of these "alternatives" are pretty much useless to anyone who used Skype to call land-lines overseas from a country other then the US.

Sure, there are million and one of peer-to-peer "chat" apps, ranging from text only to full video. But its all pointless if the other end has just an old plain telephone and the going long-distance rate is $4 a minute.

That is why Skype is a huge deal for a lot of people. Software "openness", while very nice, does bring very little to the table where the functionality is controlled by international deals with telephone companies.

And no, SIP is not an alternative either. This kludgy junk-pile of a "protocol" is so NAT unfriendly as to make it functionally useless for anyone who does not want to maintain their own Asterisk server complete with a commercial, fixed IP address.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I've configured asterisk and used linphone and ekiga. I agree with you. SIP is ok in an internal network but it won't help much with calls over the internet. A random WLAN at an airport for example often only allows outgoing TCP connections to ports 80 and 443. There's no established standard on how to have SIP work in such a setup. You can run your own relay server and route all your traffic with openvpn to it but most people don't have such an option unfortunately.

Anyways, Google Voice seems to work with pidgin and empathy. Google offers relay servers that listen on port 443. Have you hit networks where it doesn't work?

Re:Useless

[icebraining]

Google Voice is problematic "from a country other than the US".

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

And no, NAT is not an alternative either. This kludgy junk-pile of a "routing protocol" is so freedom unfriendly as to make it functionally useless for anyone who wants to do more than browse the facebooks complete with a level 99 Farmville character.

Raise your hand...

[swb]

...if you've had someone ask you with a straight face "..if you know of a good voice chat application for mobile phones."

Now, I know that this can be asked seriously in a specific way (ie, SIP specific, or "free" or whatever) but it still seems to suffer from a large amount of irony.

Re:Raise your hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

*raises hand*

International calling is inexplicably expensive on a mobile phone. Skype and Google Talk bring that price down past reasonable to dirt cheap.

Ekiga (Former Gnome Meeting)

[fjin]

Is Ekiga really unknown for most of the users?
It has Linux and Windows versions available.

Re:Ekiga (Former Gnome Meeting)

[Anonymous Coward]

It seldom works though, and it's a bloated piece of shit.

Re:disarmament celebrations world wide, life goes

[fyrewulff]

Man, Swype is a bitch to learn, ain't it?

Jitsi

[Bryan3000000]

I've been checking out the http://jitsi.org/. It used to be SIP Communicator, but has added support for all common IM protocols. It does video calls and desktop sharing over SIP and XMPP. The only disadvantage I can find is that it is does not work with ekiga.net (because ekiga.net uses a not-recommended method of NAT traversal).

Jitsi seems to be developing quickly and has proven rock-solid for me in daily use.

Re:Jitsi

[GPLHost-Thomas]

It simply sux. It's slow, written in Java, crashes often, and has no core libs written by upstream authors (they just use purple lib like "everyone else", and so many other libs). More over, it's not a peer to peer (eg: without *any* server in the middle) kind of client like Skype is. Jitsi might "look" good, but it is crap when you really start to use it.
As for other alternatives, there's many that wont support ZRTP. People got to realize that listening to a SIP call is really trivial using wireshark (it would reconstruct the RTP stream so easily). ZRTP isn't easy to implement, as it has to be done from library to GUI all the way (so you can check the auth string on the GUI).
Also, let's be realistic: RTP / ZRTP sux. Forget about morons that are saying SIP doesn't do NAT (it does through STUN very easily), or that sound is poor (it in fact depends on the codec), but what sux here, is the transport protocol, and the fact that we always have to have a server in the middle, and all sorts of mess for things that should be damned easy, like chat and file transfer. Yes, there's simple, XMPP, etc, but it really doesn't work well, unless we're all using the same client, which never happens. Some will use Ekiga, some Linux Phone, some Jitsi. And at the end, they do not work well together, unfortunately.

Re:Jitsi

[houstonbofh]

Skype needs a server in the middle too... Unless you mean it can direct p2p after the session is initiated. Kinda like the sip canreinvite=yes option.

Re:Jitsi

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Which doesn't work if using NAT on both sides, if I'm not mistaking, right?

Re:Jitsi

[houstonbofh]

Unless both sides are STUNed. And Skype will also not work p2p if both sides are NATed without some type of proxy.

Re:Jitsi

[richlv]

if it only had some "desktop sharing" or more like "presentation" mode... that would be perfect :)

in an ideal case there might be two options - read-only desktop viewing and emulated "display" so one could use presenter plugin from oo.org/lo to show slides to the remote host & presenter screen locally...

(with linux as the host, of course =) )

Re:Jitsi

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! So much hate :). I suppose a few of the above are worth addressing:

> they just use purple lib like "everyone else", and so many other libs

No they don't. They use different libs for different protocols. Smack for XMPP, JSIP for SIP, ice4j.org for ICE and STUN, etc.

> More over, it's not a peer to peer (eg: without *any* server in the middle) kind of client like Skype is.

What really matters for a communications application is that media traffic flows directly end-to-end when possible and only uses relays if nothing else works. That's how skype does it and this is also what you would get with Jitsi + XMPP + ICE. The only difference is that Skype claim their signalling is also p2p. So what? Signalling isn't heave so you can run hundreds of thousands of users on a regular laptop. The only difference you get with p2p signalling is that when you log onto skype or disconnect abruptly, it may take minutes or even hours for your buddies to register your status change.

> As for other alternatives, there's many that wont support ZRTP.

Well Jitsi does ...

> Also, let's be realistic: RTP / ZRTP sux.

Ha :) You know that Skype are also using RTP, right? Sure it's encrypted and whatnot but the content is RTP+RTCP :)

> Forget about morons that are saying SIP doesn't do NAT (it does through STUN very easily)

Almost. Indeed, SIP doesn't have that much of a problem but not because of STUN. Most SIP servers would put themselves in the middle of the conversation and relay everything. This solves NAT traversal just fine. Of course, there's a scalability issue here and that's where ICE comes in. STUN is part of ICE but use of STUN alone has been long deprecated as there are many situations where it wouldn't work.

Blink

[Anonymous Coward]

for a Skype-like teleconferencing app without video: Blink

Callcentric

[droidsURlooking4]

I've had luck with Callcentric. They support plenty of devices and softphones.

Self Profiling prophecy.

[jellomizer]

Microsoft buys Skype.
Linux users ditch Skype
Microsoft sees very little Linux Skype usage so drops it from development.
Linux user assert their fear that Microsoft will drop all Linux apps it purchases.

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[darkgrayknight]

...Naturally. Seems like whenever Microsoft gets close to anything Linux, the Linux community rails against Microsoft. It is a wonder Microsoft does anything with open source and Linux. I'm interested in seeing where Skype will go now that Microsoft controls it. They might improve it enough to make video calls a standard experience across the world. If only telecoms could get with the program and provide decent Internet connections with less restrictions.

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[TheRedDuke]

I would be surprised to see MS drop Linux support so quickly, especially with the Android market share growing at the rate that it is.

On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine a future with millions of cell phone users Skyping each other...on WM7 phones.

To be continued...

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[dr.newton]

The Linux client and the Android client likely have no more in common than the OS X client and the Windows client.

It's more accurate to speak of Android and Linux as two separate platforms for Skype than to imply that Skype on Android has any impact on Skype on Linux.

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Illogical technologists. Lol

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[Anonymous Coward]

profiling?

the term is self fulfilling prophecy

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Run rats run!

Re:Self Profiling prophecy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I need to stop posting when I'm stoned, look at the rubbish I post.

Because the desktop is history for Google

[brunes69]

The official platform for Google Talk is not Windows or Mac, it is GMail.

The GMail Google Talk client is the one with the most features. Which makes sense, considering that it will be the client their ChromeOS runs.

Now that Android supports native video in Google talk for both 2.3.4 and honeycomb, I expect a renewed push for video in all Google Talk clients. However, I also never see the desktop client matching the GMail one for features.

Re:disarmament celebrations world wide, life goes

[Prosthetic_Lips]

Mod parent up, funny!

Missing the point

[InsaneLampshade]

People use Skype because other people use Skype.

How can anyone believe any of these are viable alternatives if they don't connect to the Skype network? Do the proponents truly expect everyone currently using skype to suddenly switch to one of these "alternatives"? I think not.

All the while most people are using Skype, most people will continue to use Skype.

Re:Missing the point

[Jimbookis]

Also Skype just works, in that it: - Successfully negotiates and punches through most NAT and firewall setups. - Doesn't need any configuration at all to get working, just log in after a simple initial registration. - Has great audio and video quality. - Your mother and her mother can use it. Once the free and open source equivalents can deal with this issue of making it just work without any configuration then they'll be onto a winner.

Re:Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

People use Skype because other people use Skype.

That's true...

How can anyone believe any of these are viable alternatives if they don't connect to the Skype network?

People can run multiple apps in parallel. I'm sure they ran ICQ, AIM and MSN in parallel with Skype a few years back.

Do the proponents truly expect everyone currently using skype to suddenly switch to one of these "alternatives"? I think not.

No, but if someone makes a better Skype than Skype people will begin to use it in parallel with Skype.

All the while most people are using Skype, most people will continue to use Skype.

All the while most people are using ICQ, most... Wait... That's not how it works, is it?

Re:Missing the point

[FoogyFoo]

So it seems that the best way to compete with Skype is to be a Facebook app. Everyone uses it.

Re:Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if you were being serious or not, but that sounds like a great idea!

If Facebook and LinkedIn offered video conferencing and phone calling then Skype would be doomed! Not to mention if it were browser based, in theory that should mean it works on most OS's. :D

Re:Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Speech to text isn't good enough yet to spy on what everyone is saying so that you can target ads...

Google is doing it because they know speech to text will soon be good enough.

Dear IT World

[killmenow]

Get rid of all that garbage surrounding your articles and stop unnecessarily breaking tiny posts across multiple pages. The very IT crowd that is your core audience hates that shit.

Jitsi

[Weezul]

What's wrong with Jitsi? It looks good to me.

alternative? what alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

if MSFT is diligent about their $8.5 bn, they would kill skype for Linux in due time - skype as of now lets Linux be a much better alternative to windows desktop. If they kill skype for linux and say, mac, they can establish windows desktop at-least with a specific breed of users who use computers just for the long distance voip audio/video calls.

fwiw,
if Google does not release a stand alone client for linux (like the gtalk client on windows), gtalk will not quite become "the" alternative for linux users - I am surely not going to leave a browser session open signed into my gmail just to do google talk voip audio/video calls - thats a huge security risk for me.
ekiga,empathy et al - lacks ease of use, not quite there yet imo. skype is/was easier for my parents to use, they have been using skype on linux for years now.!
What's left? - jitsi (http://jitsi.org/,http://twit.tv/floss162 ) - LGPL stuff still its infancy - but if it evolves right, that'd be swell.

In the meantime, I gingerly continue to use skype - as my contacts are currently on skype, is supported by a myriad of devices, and above all, works on my linux desktop - not sure for how long though.

Re:alternative? what alternative?

[evuraan]

I've made skype popular! Despite being a linux user! I've introduced it to at least 30+ people - they have in-turn added others - think of it as the "Rabbit Problem" - I persuaded them to abandon other platforms (yahoo/msn messengers mostly) to move onto skype. Of course, they liked their experience with skype and thats why they chose to stay, thanks to its p2p nature -- allowing it to scale massively. if the so called alternative is good enough, I will do this again - play Moses again - onto the new promised better alternative - However, Ekiga, Empathy, Linphone, Jitsi, Google talk etc available for Linux out there now are quite SHITTY as of now & dont qualify enough to taunt my voip contacts with.
Will do skype as long as it works on linux. sigh!

Re:alternative? what alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the same experience with my brand of shampoo. At first I told two friends. Then they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Bandwidth Used To Matter, But Not Much Today

[billstewart]

Back when I started dealing with VOIP, bandwidth mattered a lot, because a typical home user had a modem, and a typical business office had a T1 voice line or less for a bunch of people and would like to be able to get both voice and data onto the same line to save money, or they were trying to make international connections to countries with extremely overpriced monopoly telcos and wanted to save a lot of money So a 64kbps codec, which burned 80kbps or more after IP overhead, was way too big - an 8kbps codec would fit onto a 14.4 modem, but didn't quite fit into 9600 async. When I first got DSL at home, it was 384kbps symmetric, and when I first got ADSL, it was 1.5/128, which was actually worse for VOIP because you had to be careful to prioritize the VOIP on your upstream.

On the other hand, PCs didn't have a lot of horsepower back then, so if you wanted to run on a 386/33, you couldn't use some low-bit-rate codec that burned 40 bogomips. The crossover hit somewhere around the 486 timeframe, where your processor was fast enough to run a codec that would fit on your modem and sound better than a Speak&Spell. By the time Pentiums came out, 28.8kbps modems were also showing up, and codecs were getting better - there are a number of 16kbps codecs requiring under 30MIPS, and the cruder ones could run fine on an Arduino, but with Pentium horsepower you can easily run codecs at 8kbps or less.

If you're trying to run VOIP on a cellphone to save money, you've probably got a 3G smartphone, so you've got 400+ MHz of CPU to play with, and latency is more of a problem than bandwidth (though it's a lot better than on 2.5G networks.)

The real problems that Skype solved were

• NAT traversal
• Cheap gateway to public telephone network
• Good enough marketing that lots of people were running it so you could call them.

The latter problem is the difficult one.

Backwards compatibility?

[damn_registrars]

it seems like Skype has been pretty good at keeping backwards compatibility so far. It doesn't seem to matter much how close (or distant) the versions are on two different systems currently. As long as they don't break that trend, Linux users should be OK for some time to come even if MS drops development of new versions for Linux.

That said, MS still wants to make money. If they can keep customers around, they will. It isn't in their own best interest to drop Linux development of Skype, because the Linux users likely won't go out and buy a version of Windows to use Skype in the future; hence they become lost customers.

Re:Backwards compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Skype version 1.7 on an old Nokia N810 tablet (ARM architecture) and it connects just fine to newer clients on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. The other VOIP application ("Internet Call") on the tablet is supposed to work with SIP and Gtalk but doesn't. So Skype wins the backward compatibility contest there.

The big problem with Skype is that is depends on users with direct internet connections to act as "supernodes" for the benefit of everyone else hunkered down behind firewalls and NAT'ed routers. Yes, it works, but is it really a robust method for the long term?

Re:Backwards compatibility?

[SvnLyrBrto]

> That said, MS still wants to make money. If they can keep customers
> around, they will. It isn't in their own best interest to drop Linux
> development of Skype, because the Linux users likely won't go out
> and buy a version of Windows to use Skype in the future; hence they
> become lost customers.

You could say that about any of the products that microsoft has bought and then dropped, or seriously curtailed, support for other OSs. Losing the customers and money won't stop them for a second if they think they can harm the other platform.

Remember Bungie's plans for Halo (simultaneous release for Mac and PC of a game that was demo'd to be significantly more awesome than the crippled not-multiplatform game that released) before microsoft bought them? Remember the plans for the continuation of the Oni and Myth properties? Now... remember what eventually happened with Halo and the planned Oni and Myth sequels?

Remember how Connectix VirtualPC was bought by microsoft? Remember how they then killed it? And that's a prime example of my point. Most VirtualPC sales were also sales of a copy of windows. So they'd have been making money off both the emulator and the guest OS. But they bought the software from Connectix, and gave up the money they could have made selling it, just to do harm to the Macintosh as a platform.

Microsoft has demonstrated plenty of times that they will give up some short-term profit if they think they can make one more step towards killing all other options and forcing everyone to use windows. Why should anyone believe their word when they say this time is different?

A social semantic desktop?

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.semanticdesktop.org/

My own limited attempts in that direction:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

Google Voice + PBXes

[mmmmbeer]

If you create a PBXes account, you can have it act as a client for Google Talk. Then you can connect to PBXes using any SIP client, and make and receive calls through your GV number.

Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

[Trafficone]

If you're really concerned about Skype support on Linux, then you can set up an Asterisk box and buy the Skype for Asterisk channel http://store.digium.com/productview.php?product_code=1SFA0001 for only $66. That way you can get all the joy that comes with having to keep and maintain your own pet SIP project, and you don't have cut yourself out from the world of Skype users in the process.

Re:Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

[Dr_Barnowl]

But only for a limited time....

Skype have elected not to renew their license to Digium, so you can only get a product that's supported until June 2013. And only if you purchase and activate it before the end of this June.

I can't see them getting too many sales on the back of that pitch.

Skype v SIP

[ras]

We make not see a Open Source replacement for Skype. But all of the reasons I see given here are just wrong.

Most of them blame SIP for being hard to set up or incompatible with NAT. These things have nothing to do with SIP. SIP is just one part of a rather large tool box needed to build an internet phone. SIP is actually a small part - the bit that handles the negotiation between the two ends over how to send the voice. It does not send actually send the voice - it leaves that job to another protocol, RTP. It doesn't even negotiate the codec - SDP does that. It does not resolve domain names - DNS does that. It does not pierce NAT - STUN does that. It does not do auto-configuration, but any number of SIP based phones out that can pull down their configuration information from a URL. Blaming SIP for not doing these things is like blaming a car engine for not coming with a fuel tank. You are blaming the wrong thing. Blame the person who designed the phone that uses SIP for not providing those things. Don't blame SIP. It has nothing to do with SIP.

I'd bet SIP is used to make far more calls in any given day that Skype is. SIP is used as the basis of all IP phones out there - Cisco, Polycom and so on. IP PABX's are now a common feature in most enterprises. They have gradually replaced the old analogue PABX's, so many business calls have some leg passing over a SIP connection. Also, if an ISP offers VOIP they will invariably do so using SIP. Which just goes to prove what I said above - people are using SIP phones every day, without problems, in fact without even realising it is a SIP phone. They just pick up the handset and dial the number, or more likely touch the softbutton besides the persons name. It's actually easier than using Skype. They can do this because it is possible to set up a SIP phone that just works - just like Skype does.

Which of course proves it is perfectly possible to design a VOIP system based on SIP that is every good as Skype. For people saying "what about Skype's fantastic codec's", Skype has done great work with codec's. But there are free ones out that almost as good, and besides Skype publishes their codec algorithms. To put together a Skype like system that used SIP isn't technically hard. A SIP softphone on all major platforms (including all phones) that automatically downloads its configuration from their servers would be one piece of the puzzle. So would maintaining a set of whitepages of people who use the system - just like Skype does. And a STUN server. And a messaging server. And a call test service. And purchase connectivity to all the existing telco's out there, so you can interact with the real phone system. The list goes on and on.

But that probably isn't going to happen on the scale Skype has done it. The reason is simple: sure open source can provide the software for free, but it takes real money to set up and run the rest of the infrastructure. So far it everyone who has done it has lost money, Skype being the leading example. It has bleed money since its inception, so much so that the media has had a field day questioning Microsoft's sanity for paying $8 billion for it. Given its history, what sane person would want to go try and build a new Skype ecosystem? The answer is no one - which is why there won't be an open source equivalent of Skype any time soon.

Re:Skype v SIP

[wrook]

Slashdot could really use FAQs. I swear I type this response every year ;-)

The problem with NAT traversal is that SIP and RTP require you to use a large number of ports. If both sides are behind NAT, STUN is used to determine the network facing port number and SIP is used to communicate that port number. But the problem is that if you receive a packet before you send a packet, the firewall will send an ICMP packet back. This is not a problem in itself, but many, many firewalls (including Linux based ones at one time) *bind the port* for a while after sending the the ICMP packet. When you get around to sending the packet, the firewall reassigns the network facing port number. Voila; one way audio! No amount of STUN (or ICE) will help you. And, as I said, a *very* large number of routers exist with this problem.

This problem has actually been know for decades (although I've been told it is against the spec). The way you are *supposed* to solve the problem is to write your protocol so that incoming packets come in on only one port. You then port forward that port to the correct place. This is what is meant when we say that the SIP protocol is broken (well, it's also really, really poorly designed in a number of other areas, but those are mostly fixable). Why don't we design a protocol that isn't broken? Because there is no point. Nobody's grandmother knows how to port forward on their router anyway, so its a moot point.

In the meantime, we are faced with one way audio problems in a large number of cases where both sides are behind NAT, even when we use STUN. The way we *actually* fix the problem is by putting a media proxy (session border controller) in the middle. This is a device that is not behind NAT. It acts as a proxy for the call. Both sides connect to the proxy and the proxy forwards the packets. It waits until both sides have sent packets before it forwards them. This fixes the problem. But the downside is that the proxy has to carry the traffic for the whole call.

Skype also has this problem. My understanding is that Skype is using a modified version of SIP underneath anyway. The way Skype solves this problem is by identifying clients that aren't behind NAT. Those clients are used to proxy the media for other clients that are behind NAT. In other words, if you use Skype and you aren't behind NAT, there's a good chance you will be carrying traffic for those that are behind NAT. Free software authors *could* implement this functionality, but those that actually understand the problem (a small number of people) generally think this approach is evil. The general approach has been to rely on using things like Asterisk to forward traffic and simply wait until all the broken routers disappear. With the advent of more and more P2P applications and the popularity of using UPNP to open ports on routers, it's only matter of time before this fixes itself. But in the meantime, we choose not to make a client that will work in all circumstances the way that Skype does.

Finally, on the quality of Skype's codecs. My understanding is that Skype at one time used the GIPS codecs and RTP libraries. I've used them myself and they are definitely extremely good. Just googling them now, I was interested to see that Google has acquired GIPS. I wonder if they would consider open sourcing those libraries... But you are correct. It's just code and free software writers can do just as good a job as GIPS. The current codecs and RTP implementations are actually quite good from my perspective, but possibly don't have quite the same performance on lesser hardware.

Anyway, you are correct that it isn't hard to put all the pieces together to create a Skype like product. There are actually several out there. The problem is that we have to wait for the NAT problem to sort itself out. Before that happens we won't have a competitor to Skype.

Re:Skype v SIP

[McDutchie]

The way Skype solves this problem is by identifying clients that aren't behind NAT. Those clients are used to proxy the media for other clients that are behind NAT. In other words, if you use Skype and you aren't behind NAT, there's a good chance you will be carrying traffic for those that are behind NAT.

That is not correct. The Skype proxy actually punches holes in the NAT on both ends so they can talk directly. See http://www.h-online.com/security/features/How-Skype-Co-get-round-firewalls-747197.html.

Re:Skype v SIP

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, if you use Skype and you aren't behind NAT, there's a good chance you will be carrying traffic for those that are behind NAT. Free software authors *could* implement this functionality, but those that actually understand the problem (a small number of people) generally think this approach is evil.

So, the solution would be to create a OSS client explicitly allows non-NAT users to set the amount of bandwidth he/she wants to 'donate' to the NAT-ed users.

I for instance have a server with a 100GB/month data limit, using usually only 20-30. I would gladly run the client set to donate 1G/day (possibly increased at the end of the month).

Re:Skype v SIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software authors *could* implement this functionality, but those that actually understand the problem (a small number of people) generally think this approach is evil.

How's that any more evil than the bittorrent protocol? Is it simply the lack of consent or knowledge (which may actually be disclosed (aka buried) in the TOS that a user must accept before using Skype)? If that's the case, free software authors adopting Skype's solution to the problem only need to disclose how user communications are established and voila, it's not evil anymore.

Re:Skype v SIP

[wrook]

The "hole punching" they describe is STUN. That's precisely how STUN works. But as is also mentioned in the article, it doesn't always work (the scenario I described above where the NAT router binds the port when it receives the first packet). The article goes on to explain that the "Skype Server" carries the traffic in that case. What it doesn't explain is that the "Skype Server" is often just any old machine that happens not to be behind NAT. These are called Skype Super Nodes. If you are interested there many, many explanations on how they work that you can find through Google.

How about the MULTICS Skype alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

A very long string and two cups. No?

Re:How about the MULTICS Skype alternative

[Nimey]

Two girls and one cup.

try yuuguu ?

[philshap]

At my last job we had to come up with a solution for a problem like this, we needed a cross-platform (mac, win, linux) voice chat that supported screen sharing and call conferencing. After trying a bunch out we settled on yuuguu and used it very successfully for remote code reviews, design discussions, etc. Google talk was a nonstarter, they didn't have a mac client at the time and skype didn't have desktop sharing.

Not sure if it supports video chat too but we didn't have any need for that...

Anyway check it out http://www.yuuguu.com/

Does no one remember Speak Freely?

[mrmeval]

http://www.speakfreely.org/

I made many international 'telephone' calls long distance free over a crappy 56k modem using this software. I'd lost the need to use it and moved to windows.

Development ended in 2002. Pity.

Multipoint features are most important

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I wouldn't count any "alternative" unless if it had desktop sharing and most importantly multi-point video conferencing. Skype may be Microsoft product but especially on Windows the multipoint stuff really works and allows you to interact with groups of people.

There are no USABLE open source alternatives around unless if you're content with single point video & audio. Usability is they key, let's forget the traditional vic&rat approach and its derivaties, or h323 bridges which have extremely bad quality and have bad usability...

Mumbles...

[Anonymous Coward]

For voice, I just use Mumble and then host my own Murmur server. Sure that has its limitations and is stretching the application a little, but I've gotten it to work quite well with few problems. And it has the benefit of not needing anything other than using a decent broadband ISP. (Since you can easily host your own server, no other middleman involved.)

Video chat on the other hand is another thing. There's the video option under the Gmail chat, but it still doesn't seem to be consistent enough across platforms. Maybe they'll fix it in time now that the demand will be there.

Evil v "evil".

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype also has this problem. My understanding is that Skype is using a modified version of SIP underneath anyway. The way Skype solves this problem is by identifying clients that aren't behind NAT. Those clients are used to proxy the media for other clients that are behind NAT. In other words, if you use Skype and you aren't behind NAT, there's a good chance you will be carrying traffic for those that are behind NAT. Free software authors *could* implement this functionality, but those that actually understand the problem (a small number of people) generally think this approach is evil.

Why would open source writers think using another consenting computer's resources "evil"? P2P does it all the time and no one thinks anything of it.

Re:Evil v "evil".

[dkf]

Why would open source writers think using another consenting computer's resources "evil"? P2P does it all the time and no one thinks anything of it.

Because they're telco types at heart, not infosystems types. Different communities have different standards of acceptable behavior. (The interesting thing about Skype is that its developers were enough in tune with both sides of this particular debate to understand the technology of IP telephony and implement a workable solution for the show-stopper problems.)

Ekiga - Wait for the next version please

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I'm not an Ekiga developer, but I have helped them trace a bug.

Ekiga is still under heavy development and the present 'stable release' is anything but. For me, it crashes on Fedora 14, for some people it actually works. The main problem at the moment is actually not in Ekiga itself, but in Opal. The next release should fix many problems by using a newer version of Opal and then more people should be able to use Ekiga with success.

Re:Ekiga - Wait for the next version please

[paulatz]

Disclaimer: I'm not an Ekiga developer, but I have helped them trace a bug.

That's not a disclaimer, but a disclosure.

imo.im

[paulatz]

Even if I'm not a big fan of web service, i.e. I detest webmails, I suggest this wonderful web-based alternative: imo.im. Its killer feature is that it is compatible with skype and can let you make and receive voice and video calls in-browser using only the flash plugin.

Of course it also supports other protocols, included MSN, goole talk and, facebook chat up to a total of 9. Accounts can be linked together so you only need to login with one. There is also a downloadable client but, afaik, only for windows and an android client, which does not allow voice calls (yet?). I regularly use it at my office (where installing skype is forbidden)

Pretty damn close to perfect response

[LostMyBeaver]

ZRTP is off limits to most clients since Zimmerman has made the license so restrictive AND EXPENSIVE that commercial vendors simply aren't interested in it.

SRTP is utter rubbish and should never be bothered with. Oddly, I happen to know that the video conferencing systems used by most governments are "secured" by it.

RTP is a weak protocol at best. The only advantage of it (as I'm programming a TS over RTP mux) is that it is common. Even with RTCP additions, bidirectional clock synchronization is rough. Additionally the granularity of ACK/NACK as an after thought was a mess. In the case of video conferencing, being able to perform pure predicted video unless a new intra is requested is a must. The latency of RTCP in this scenario is too long. Also, the sequence counter of RTP is so damn small that when transmitting high bit rate video over UDP, it's entirely possible a 1 second network dropout can go entirely undetected/corrected.

Forward error correction, a damn near minimum requirement of block based codecs in audio/video is a joke with regards to RTP as well.

Skype was beautiful since instead of focusing on inter-op with crap standards like SIP, which are either too damn big to effectively implement (H.323 for example) or too damn small (SIP) to be useful, they instead hacked their own protocol which included just about everything good.

As a further note, Skype is wonderful because it is by far the best in class for acoustic echo cancellation in free software. PC's suffer the terrible flaws of imprecise timers (floating clocks, cheap crystals, etc...) and very often unpredictable I/O latencies (on systems where ASIO hardware is not available, meaning 99.9% est.), crap speakers, crappier microphones etc... Without using a hardware based acoustic echo cancellation system or isolating the microphone from the speakers eliminating the need for AEC, it is very hard to achieve in software. You need to :
    a) identify the clock rates of the audio output and input constantly as their crystals can be drifting differently
    b) rate convert the input or output stream
    c) search the input stream for the output stream in order to synchronize clocks
    d) adjust levels of the input or output
    e) subtract the output from the input to cancel the echo, hopefully removing some added noise due to low quality components in the process.

Oddly, adding a high quality microphone to the webcam you bought amplifies the problems substantially and even removes your ability to adjust the microphone location as the camera needs to remain focused. The added USB latency makes the problem even worse.

Additionally, if there's something more than just your conversation coming from the speakers, there's even more to be done to alter the definition of the output audio in order to remove the echo of that additional noise as well. It requires the AEC code to "read the output" back from the audio subsystem instead of using the audio it sent to the subsystem.

This task is insanely complex in software and uses an insane amount of CPU. "The Good Stuff" meaning the expensive software from certain vendors (of which I worked for one) requires more CPU power to process just the AEC than was required to handle H.264 encoding AND decoding at 720p. And still we couldn't reliably handle more than just 12Khz signals on a Core 2 Duo 1.76Ghz.

So, if we looked at it from purely a technology perspective, the closed/proprietary systems are very likely better solutions than the open and standard compliant systems as there is SOOOO much room for improvement that the standards based systems can't compete.

From a business perspective, Skype has the majority of the world's chat messenger and voice chatting users. When granny wants to video chat with her little grandchild, she Skypes them. If you buy a notebook with a camera, it's a Skype compatible camera that matters. If you buy a webcam, it says Skype on the box.

Converting that many users to something new is pretty much out of the question.

Jabber.

[Anonymous Coward]

A skype alternative needs to:
- be compatible with Linux _and_ Windows clients (say bye bye to the list in TFA)
- support text messaging
- support audio calls
- support video calls
Then, it would be nice, if:
- other people used it too
- it had an interface with the real-world telephone system (everywhere in the world)

I currently bet on Jabber / the xmmp protocol (it allows audio and video plugins). It is not quite there yet, but it clearly has the potential. I heavily write bug reports for my favorite xmmp client and promote jabber among my friends. That's the best one can do.

VoIP on a Mobile Phone is bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

I use VoIP on my phone, done so since a few years. I like getting away from my desk while on the phone.

Currently I use the very mature Acrobits App, they make iPhone and Android versions. Since I do a lot of international calling, I use one of the BetaMAX providers for cheaply calling mobile phones. It's nice to be able to do this on both WiFi and 3G.

Amusing.

[Narcogen]

It's amusing to me that the initial rash of "Microsoft overpaid for Skype" stories, supported by laundry lists of potential competitors both inside and outside of Microsoft, as well as overlapping technologies and services, has quickly been followed by a rash of "Alternatives to Skype" stories, nearly all of which actually fail to come up with any service, app, or combination of the two that offers a serviceable alternative to Skype even for a reasonable subset of its functionalities, to say nothing of the entire package.

The fact that every potential alternative to Skype comes with a raft of exceptions and caveats tells me that right now, on the market, there's no alternative to Skype. That may not justify the pricetag, but it's a first step.

Skype has a client on all major desktop operating systems and several major mobile operating systems. It is both a product and a service. It offers presence and free voice calling and audio conferences, and free two-party videoconferencing, backed by P2P traffic routing for improved performance in situations where users distant from a dedicated softswitch might encounter bottlenecks and call-killing latency. It offers competitive rates for PSTN connectivity. It's not perfect, but it does a lot and does it fairly well.

Not only do none of the suggested alternatives, in this article or any other I've seen, do all of that, but none are on a road to even attempt to do it. It's always a mishmash of SIP clients, some linked to one particular provider, others not, most of which don't offer presence or P2P functionality, along with a few apps that aren't full-fledged SIP clients, that may or may not offer presence or P2P functionality, but limited or absent PSTN connectivity. The ones that have comparable or larger user bases than Skype don't have a fraction of that service's functionality.

Like many, I'm on the lookout for a credible alternative to Skype since the buyout-- or, to be more precise, since the release of Skype 5.x on OSX. I don't see any now, nor do I see any on the horizon. Perhaps Apple should rectify some of the shortcomings in FaceTime and release clients for Windows and Linux, along with a Mac client that is integrated with ichat, instead of a separate, standalone app.

Mod up parent

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to say the exact same thing.

For the newbies

[Anonymous Coward]

Naive bluster aside, slashdot ID's are large enough these days to indicate a large proportion of folks here have never really suffered the consequences of succumbing to Microsoft's business practices. Here's what will happen, unless MS has morphed into a new kind of company, on account of Ballmer et al receiving brain transplants. Not what /might/ happen - what /will/ happen. Skype's feature set will be "improved" with functionality that other SIP communications platforms just don't have. How? By extending their use of the protocol beyond the standard, of course. Oh, it will still work with other SIP platforms. Kind of. But if you want the full Skype experience, well, all parties will have to use Skype. Microsoft's embrace and extend strategy is well known, well documented (by Microsoft's own internal memos), and is the primary reason that many folks consider any alternative to MS technology "better", even if said technology isn't as feature rich as Microsoft's offering. See, many folks don't consider vendor lock-in a feature, but a trap to be avoided at almost any cost.

Open Source Low Bit Rate Speech CODEC

[Tech Observer]

I found this and have been following for awhile, it is neat project and could benefit us all even more so than a high bandwidth CODEC such as skype uses going open source! per the site: http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452 "Codec2 is an open source low bit rate speech codec designed for communications quality speech at around 2400 bit/s. Applications include low bandwidth HF/VHF digital radio and VOIP trunking. Codec 2 operating at 2000 bit/s can send 32 phone calls using the bandwidth required for one 64 kbit/s uncompressed phone call. It fills a gap in open source, free-as-in-speech voice codecs beneath 5000 bit/s and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)." It has a bit of support now, and you can even donate a few bucks to get the ball moving faster!

linux alt fail

[Anonymous Coward]

linux wont find your web cam driver

two alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend migrated to Nimbuzz since the acquisition.
And then I googled Fringo (seconds ago).

Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have been using Empathy for a couple of weeks"

or

"I have been using Empathy since a couple of weeks ago"

Facebook must die

[bobs666]

You both are correct. The new Phone needs to be like Unfortunately email was developed as a university ( MIT ) where people shared software and protocols.

Now things like this are called IP and hidden away. and if you figure them out and use them for the common good is called Piracy, and a cause for litigation.

So I conclude that without goverement support, say DARPA, wo will not be seeing any open IP phone systems in our life time.

It makes me sad that most people do not understand how computing is being set back, in this day and age. The only viable solution at this time is the GNU. Thank you Richard.

PS. Let them just call it Linux. Pick the fights worth fighting.

Kludge: Improve the old fashioned phone line

[jago25_98]

  Personally I dodge the whole situation by using my mobile phone (which is Nokia Symbian) - with Fring and a VoIP SIP provider for a normal phone line. For voice calls I find this to be the most compatible solution.

  This gives me a DiD (like Skype-in) and I configure my provider to forward calls to my mobile if I'm offline. That costs me nothing.

  The caller sometimes has to pay but it's often not much and the only people who might complain are in foreign lands and rare instances. For this I can:

- give an access number to dial through
- get a a DiD in their local country
- fall back to gTalk

  Regards video I used to use Skype but video on Symbian is no longer possible since they blocked fring. So I'm stuck here. I've looked at Bamuser and even stickam but yet to really give them a go. I expect things will change when Symbian gets fully out of date, though hopefully I'll be able to hang on for a bit longer with it.

I could do with some sort of answerphone service too.

However, I don't know many people with Skype (!?). It would certainly be nice to be able to video call people for free.