Software Freedom Day: Hunt for Skype alternatives

[MJ Ray]

Timo Juhani Lindfors <timo.lindfors at iki.fi>
> Perfectly well? At least with SIP it surely did not work from our
> university where only outgoing tcp connections were allowed. I have
> another place where the only way out is through a HTTP proxy. Ekiga did
> not work there either. And at the same time everyone else was using
> Skype and trying to get me to use it too.

It depends what you mean by "work".  Is overriding the network's
restrictions a feature or a bug?  Feature to the user, but bug to the
network managers.  If the network is that nasty, shouldn't users be
connecting to a VPN?

Skype's firewall-busting is pretty extreme and seems to work a lot of
the time, but I boycott Skype because I can't tell what it's doing,
there have been enough bad reports that I don't trust it and the
alternatives of SIP/RTP and XMPP work well enough for me for now.

This is a rather old problem, which I covered back in
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2007/fsf
so if anyone can solve it and help provide easy-to-use Free Software
internet phones to more people, that's great to see.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/