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Alas Poor Skype, I Knew You Well

I Need an Open Source Alternative to Skype

By Stephen Spector on Wed, 05/11/11 - 4:25pm.

With the announcement that Microsoft is buying Skype, I thought I would help promote an alternative solution from the GNU team, GNU Free Call. From the GNU site:

GNU Free Call is a new project to develop and deploy secure self-organized communication services worldwide for private use and for public administration.
We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured peer-to-peer mesh calling networks, and we welcome all participation in our effort.

The project was announced in mid March 2011,http://www.gnutelephony.org/index.php/GNU_Free_Call_Announcement, and is being managed by Haakon Eriksen and David Sugar under the GNU General Public License. For presentations about this project, see http://www.slideshare.net/group/gnu-telephony/slideshows.

So, will the open source community rally around a technology like GNU Free Call or will we do something similar to our Apple addiction, and continue to use Skype or Google Voice as long as those options are supported on Linux, for example. I am interested to watch the next few months to see what happens as this really is an amazing opportunity for the open source community to rally behind a single project such as GNU Free Call and drive it in the marketplace.

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