Skype replacement

[Edmund Laugasson]

>>> Is Ekiga now interoperable with Skype? For some reason I don't think so.
>> There were asked replacement and not interoperability.
> Quote:
> "I would favour an open source replacement as long as it is *interoperable* with
> skype."

Then we would ask also other proprietary data formats interopreability (e.g. MS Office formats and 
OpenDocument). We all know, that only reverse engineering can help here. To whom shall I blame if I 
encapsulated my important data and/or communication into proprietary protocols and formats, what 
Skype uses? Same question appears any other proprietary versus open data format/protocol. Guilty is 
only people itself, who refuses think and understand what the heck is difference between FOSS (free 
opensource software) and proprietary software (and formats, protocols, standards, etc.). If people 
feel happy using proprietary software, no one can influence them to change their decisions. 
Otherwise people call it harassing.

People are asking also interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. As long as 
Microsoft keeps their formats in secret, it is not possible to establish 100% interoperability. The 
same thing is between Skype and Ekiga.

You can organize all your friends to use Ekiga and then you can communicate freely.

OoVoo claims to similarity of Skype - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OoVoo - but that is not a program 
I suggest to use... Certainly, you can try and you are free to decide to use it or not. But this is 
just my humble opinion, when I don't suggest it.

To understand interoperabilities, please see here - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software - there are VoIP programs compared and also 
communication protocols are listed, what each program uses. There you can see, that no one other 
program cannot interoperable with Skype due to fact, that Skype uses proprietary P2P protocol.

You can hit onto column title "Licence" to sort table by licence type. Then you can see all VoIP 
programs in this table using GPL, LGPL or other FOSS licence.


Additional reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_VoIP_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:VoIP_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype - there are a lot of links, some of them may interest...