Skype Open-Source Back In Action, Breaks v5.5

[Alliancemd]

Michael, before posting this kind of stuff make some exploration. You give false hope to people.
From what I understand you are a programmer, right?
You should take a look at the nightmare the guy wrote there, for example:

tmplen=strlen(CHAT_STRING)-4;

chatrnd=(rand() % 0x9);
CHAT_STRING[tmplen]=CHAT_STRING[tmplen]+chatrnd;
tmplen++;
printf("chatrnd=%d\n",chatrnd);
chatrnd=(rand() % 0x9);
CHAT_STRING[tmplen]=CHAT_STRING[tmplen]+chatrnd;
tmplen++;
printf("chatrnd=%d\n",chatrnd);
chatrnd=(rand() % 0x9);
CHAT_STRING[tmplen]=CHAT_STRING[tmplen]+chatrnd;
tmplen++;
printf("chatrnd=%d\n",chatrnd);
chatrnd=(rand() % 0x9);
CHAT_STRING[tmplen]=CHAT_STRING[tmplen]+chatrnd;
tmplen++;
printf("chatrnd=%d\n",chatrnd);

And a lot of this kind of stuff, it's really a nightmare... Makes me wanna cry...

[Panix]

1) Does Skype (linux version) not work then? How come there isn't criticism against Skype (MSoft) for advertising a Linux version?

2) There is no half decent skype 'alternative?' I guess Pidgin and other IMs are no good because of lacking a complete set of features (as there must be an engine that provides everything - in particular, voice)?

No voip/voice/skype alternatives?

[tettamanti]

1) Does Skype (linux version) not work then? How come there isn't criticism against Skype (MSoft) for advertising a Linux version?

Well it does work most of the time (at least the basic functionalities), but the latest release was make a year ago, and was just a minor incremental release.

2) There is no half decent skype 'alternative?' I guess Pidgin and other IMs are no good because of lacking a complete set of features (as there must be an engine that provides everything - in particular, voice)?

No voip/voice/skype alternatives?

There are other alternatives, at least in theory anything that uses SIP can be used to replace Skype. The problem is that the rest of the world still uses Skype... it's very likely that your friends/coworkers/etc. are using Skype, so if you want to communicate with them you're stuck with it.

[benmoran]

I guess average people are going to stick with Skype until Microsoft inevitably does something stupid, like charging for it, or something else to turn people off of it. When that eventually happens, we need to have a nice open alternative ready to go. There are a lot of options now, but nothing that's really 100% ready for the masses. Some are close.

I wonder how development on Gnu FreeCall is going?

[Panix]

Well it does work most of the time (at least the basic functionalities), but the latest release was make a year ago, and was just a minor incremental release.

There are other alternatives, at least in theory anything that uses SIP can be used to replace Skype. The problem is that the rest of the world still uses Skype... it's very likely that your friends/coworkers/etc. are using Skype, so if you want to communicate with them you're stuck with it.

Thanks for the info. That's what I was wondering about. I was curious what issues one might expect if trying the Linux version considering they're not really updating the releases anymore.

Any thoughts on Google Voice? I've never tried it but I had the impression it is considered somewhat of an 'alternative?'

[allquixotic]

Thanks for the info. That's what I was wondering about. I was curious what issues one might expect if trying the Linux version considering they're not really updating the releases anymore.

Any thoughts on Google Voice? I've never tried it but I had the impression it is considered somewhat of an 'alternative?'

Voice is good, but also proprietary, and it only works within a browser. More and more people I deal with are willing and able to talk over Google Voice instead of Skype, so at least we're making progress by moving away from Skype and toward Google, but if I had my druthers, Voice would have a proper desktop client, and it'd be open source... neither of which goals are currently in the works for Voice.

As far as call quality, latency, reliability, etc, I can't tell the difference between Voice and Skype. Maybe some other people on worse connections can tell, but it works fine for me.

Then again, Skype works fine for me also, even though it hasn't been updated in forever.

[allquixotic]

Voice is basically following the same "innocuous semi-evil" model that much of Google's recent services follow; by "semi-evil" I mean that the evil comes from the proprietary nature of the platform, but it doesn't harm users in practice because it's well-supported on all kinds of platforms (including Linux), it's free as in beer, and there aren't overly restrictive terms of use or anything like that. In essence, I don't think it's the end-all be-all of VoIP, but it definitely makes a positive step away from Skype, at least in terms of supportability on Linux. (Google's Voice plugin for Firefox and Chrome is still updated about four times per year and it has YUM and APT repositories).

[curaga]

Isn't Google Voice just standard Jingle audio, and you can thus call them with any supporting client?

[freedam]

Did you notice that the blog post disappeared? http://skype-open-source.blogspot.it/, maybe they had problems again.

[freedam]

Did you see that the blog post was removed? http://skype-open-source.blogspot.it/.