Voice messenger for Ubuntu 7.04

[Justin Gruenberg]

On 10/15/07, Jonathan Kaye <jdkaye10 at yahoo.es> wrote:
> Hi Harold,
> I think we need to make a distinction between a proprietary app and a
> proprietary PROTOCOL. Skype uses a proprietary protocol and this means that
> the only client that can use the skype voip protocol is a skype client. So
> when you use skype you force someone else to use it too, if they want to
> communicate with you. Compare this with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)
> which is open and not proprietary. There are loads of SIP clients, some
> proprietary others not. For example sjphone, which uses SIP, is a
> proprietary client but unlike skype, if you use sjphone you don't force
> anyone else to use sjphone. It happens that my friend uses sjphone on his
> Mac. I used to use sjphone but now I use Twinklephone, open source. I use
> it not because it's opensource but because it is better (or at least I
> prefer it to sjphone). Someone using sjphone or any other SIP proprietary
> client does not restrict my freedom. You using Skype do restrict my
> freedom. You force me to use Skype which I don't care to do.
>
> I hope that clarifies some (not all) of our objections to Skype. You might
> want to compare the version numbers and features of Skype for Windows, Mac
> or Linux. You'll notice a big difference.
>
> That's my cinc cèntimes.
> Jonathan

Skype also is simple to use, already has a huge userbase, and the
linux client has the same interface as the windows version.  I
initially recommended it for those reasons.

You can complain all you want about whether its free as in beer or
free as in speech--but it's really not helpful to anyone.  It's free.
You can present an alternate solution, which may or may not suit the
original posters needs but realize that 99.9% of software users don't
care about editing the source or open protocols--they care that it
works.