Hans Fugal wrote: >On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 at 17:42 +0100, Christoph Eckert wrote: > > >>>Personally, I'd rather >>>just avoid them altogether, as it seems what they've >>>brought to the mix is primarily marketing. >>> >>> >>Their protocol has the advantage that it works very well even >>on low bandwith connections. >> >> > >I may be off-base here, but as I understand it the bulk of the >transmission of any VOIP transmission is the audio data itself. In that >case, what matters is the codec. I don't remember the name of it, but I >do know that asterisk supports the same codec that skype uses. So >asterisk doesn't (yet?) support the skype protocol, but it should be >able to sound just as good over the same bandwidth (perhaps even better, >since IAX is a good and lean protocol). > > i may be off-base here as well, and i'm sure that the codec has a lot to do with it, but i was under the impression that Skype works as well as it does because it is based on P2P technology that distributes the network load amongst the clients? if that is the case, or if it is at least a part of the case, i was wondering if an open-source alternative could build itself from a BitTorrent base where once you are connected you are providing a small amount of bandwidth to the general pool? > > > >>And what they did very well was to make their software easy to >>use on every platform. Simply visit the homepage, download it >>and a wizard will help you configuring it. >> >> > >This is definitely important and not to be overlooked. > > > this is exactly what *is* being overlooked in favour of using open-source software at any cost. on a political level, i would agree with this - however, politics havn't sat comfortably on this list before. also overlooked is the fact that not everyone in the world uses Linux ... in fact, i'm the only person i personally know who uses Linux (i'm proseletysing, so hopefully that will change), so unfortunately any solution that i find has to be simple enough and functional enough that any of my obviously dumb Windows friends can use it. it goes without saying that none of the previously provided "real alternatives" are actually that at all (phoneGaim would be the closest). shayne
