An alternative to Skype

[Mordecha Behar]

Well, seeing as how most workers' strikes here only punish those who are
striking, that would be completely in character :P

But more seriously, the main advantage that I see to using Skype is that
everybody else does. It's like the Myspace/Facebook war of a few years ago.
Facebook won because that's what people were using. It's very nice to want
to use FOSS alternatives, but it won't help you if you're sitting there all
by yourself on the network.
I personally am rooting for that guy who reverse engineered the Skype
protocol (sorta). I know that it's bordering on illegal to use his hack, but
my (perhaps vain) hope is that at some point this will proliferate in the
wild so much that it will be unable to be enforced and MS-Skype will just
sort of give up. That means that at some point there will be FOSS
alternatives that will be able to connect to the Skype network.
It will take time, and a lot of faith, but so far Skype for Linux still
works.

2011/6/12 Udi Finkelstein <Linux-IL at udif.com>

>
> Personally, the whole fiasco did change my opinions on RMS, but this is
> unrelated to my decisions w.r.t open source. Boycotting Open Source would
> only punish myself.
>
>
> Udi
>
> 2011/6/12 Steve G. <wordz2u at gmail.com>
>
>> Maybe, but that is my choice. I am not yet abandoning open source, or
>> course, but will from now on try to be more diverse.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 2:10 AM, Baruch Even <baruch at ev-en.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 10, 2011 8:53 PM, "Steve G." <wordz2u at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > If you want computer to computer, there are plenty of chat clients that
>>> would work - Jabber, msn, aol, yahoo, I think all have voice and video
>>> communications in them. Gmail is another excellent system. The problem is
>>> the network effect - both sides must be part of the system.
>>>
>>> >
>>> > To make phone calls, other than skype there is ekiga and probably some
>>> other things, as well as gmail, but these are not free.
>>> >
>>> > Personally, whatever RMS puts on his web site, is what I will NOT be
>>> using in the future. Even if it means I have to buy MS OS, though
>>> considering that practically all laptop computers have MS on them, I doubt
>>> it would be an issue.
>>> >
>>> > I have been a devout proponent of OSS solutions for many years, but
>>> there is something to be said for for-profit software - you are not
>>> dependent on RMS and his likes. A real company supports its product
>>> regardless of politics.
>>> >
>>> > Go Proprietary Software!
>>> >
>>>
>>> Actually, any commercial company is more than likely to drop you on the
>>> floor like an hot potato at the mere sniff of trouble to them.
>>>
>>> But it seems like your response was more about childish revenge than real
>>> attempt to think things through.
>>>
>>> Baruch
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Check out my web site - www.words2u.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Linux-il mailing list
>> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
>> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20110612/07458b79/attachment.html>