On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 at 15:44 -0500, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote: > I know very little about skype and don't have much time or personal > interest in learning about it. But, it's making inroads. I want to > understand what it does and what free software alternatives are > available. Is it possible for free software alternatives to inter > operate with the skype world? Asterisk. Skype seems to be the most visible among normal people at this point, or so I hear (nobody I know uses it). But Asterisk is what is truly making inroads in corporate America. That's a good thing, because Asterisk is free, Free, excellent quality, extremely versatile, and has a vibrant community. Others have discussed what skype is and its problems and strengths. There are plenty of quality softphones available for windows that will talk some of the protocols asterisk understands. SIP being the most common, but also one of the more difficult protocols to get working behind NAT. IAX is Asterisk's own protocol that works very well behind NAT and in most other ways. A "just work" solution should be very easy for your users - grab one of those softphones[1] that is Free and package it preconfigured to connect to your Asterisk server. Use IAX and you don't have trouble with NAT. On linux the situation is not so pretty - most of the softphones that do work are lame beyond compare. Those that aren't lame in other ways just don't work. :-) But that is changing, as you can expect. I can almost guarantee that whatever linux softphone that isn't lame surfaces, will support SIP and/or IAX. 1. This one looks good, though I haven't tried it: http://www.virbiage.com/firefly/download/ -- .O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est. ..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach --------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Fingerprint: 6940 87C5 6610 567F 1E95 CB5E FC98 E8CD E0AA D460 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/linux-audio-user/attachments/20050319/66541ee6/attachment.bin
