Thread: Happy days. Skype and a new F/W version coming soon.
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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2007-04-07 , 18:15
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#88
Originally Posted by dcarter View Post
-but isn't the real reason that skype (and gizmo and gtalk voice) are not open and hackable is so you can't hack it to make free phone calls round the world, 24/7?

I for one can feel the big-money pressure of phone companies riding the partially-stillborn voip wave- at least here in fubar USA. 'wouldn't wan't folks to make free phone calls, ya'know.

dcarter
Not really; Skype is closed source because their (=eBay's) business model depends on it for other reasons. They use not only a closed source application but, even worse, a proprietary protocol that's incompatible with everything else out there.

Applications that use open protocols (usually SIP, sometimes H.323 or Jabber/Jingle) may choose to be free software or not. Usually they will be free software.

Earning money for PC2Phone-Calls is not a matter of software or proprietary protocols. I can make PC-to-phone calls (and phone to PC) with my SIP-based software; I pay a local company to provide the gateway. They do not require the protocol or the software to be proprietary, quite on the contrary: They tell customers to use standard software so they don't have to develop their own. Each call means that you log into their server - very much like you log into your Amazon account: you can do so using a free browser and the open HTTP&HTML-framework, can't you?