[Free-RTC] Escape from PRISM!

[MJ Ray]

Emil Ivov <emcho at jitsi.org>
> On the other hand, if you try to look at logs yourself and learn how to 
> read them, then you can help a lot (and learn a lot in the process).

Yeah, sure, but some apps don't produce useful logs.  I don't think
Jitsi suffers from that.

If I could make only one plea to RTC developers, it would be to have
optional ways to produce useful error messages and logs that don't
require recompiling.  If I never see something like "Failed" as the
whole text of a voip phone error again, that would be great.

> That said, I don't remember seeing you post on the Jitsi mailing lists, 
> so if you are having any issues, that would be a good place to start 
> looking for help.

I've not posted to the lists because I fear the root problem is that
Jitsi developers disagree with most SIP-POTS services about STUN and
they're probably actually correct, but that doesn't really help solve
my problem of having some way to call in/out that doesn't suck like
ippi did last time I looked (more expensive than a fixed line!)

Also, that problem not unique to Jitsi and I'm not sure which software
to approach first... so I'm quite glad I can raise it on a
multi-software list like this.

I actually got Jitsi working in the past and used it to call in to the
Cyberunions show last summer.  It was OK, but it hammered the CPU and
I think JVM was mainly to blame for that.

That's not a blocker, though.  My use of jitsi has been limited
because it seems to be desktop only (at least for usable versions),
it's not in debian and crucially: there doesn't seem to be any
XMPP-POTS in/out service available (except Google maybe?  which rather
defeats the point) and it didn't work with my current SIP-POTS
provider (draytel - I'm open to changing if someone shares what
works).

[...]
> If by "outside the same system" you mean "calling POTS phones" then 
> you'd better use SIP.

Yeah, I do.  Basically, almost no-one I want to talk to (except other
members of my co-op) uses free RTC software today, so ways to call
to/from the POTS system at near-national rates is pretty essential -
having access to multiple systems like jitsi does is helpful, too.
I wonder if some developers forget that we need to build from near
zero, so we need to interoperate when possible.

Thanks for the reply,
-- 
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/