It has a GTK+ and a QT interface, and it is designed to work with pulseaudio.

Beats Twinkle hands down.

A 10 minute story on how difficult it was to setup VoIP a few years ago.

Yes, Linux was hard to configure too. In the past.

Frankly – Skype does not work out of the box (on Ubunutu you need to be using the beta version, which uses PulseAudio, or disable PulseAudio — neither of which are “plug n’ play”).

Also annoying was the whole “Arguing in Agreement” aspect of this show. It would have been more interesting if someone was on the ‘for’ side and someone on the ‘against’ side.

In my perfect, ideal world, all internet communication protocols would be similar to E-mail in behaviour. We’d just have an incoming and outgoing server, a username and password, and we’d be good. We could contact anyone using any client from any other server without headaches and neck-pains: just claim you want to phone somebody@somedomain.com and maybe add them to your contact list.

Is that as easy as Skype? No, you still need to enter your incoming and outgoing servers. Still, if ISPs provided these, as well as perhaps similar instant-messaging(Jabber/XMMP) accounts, the same way they do E-mails (and hell, maybe even roll all of them into one account), nobody would complain. It wouldn’t be a case of needing to install Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk/Chat and possibly Thunderbird or similar for E-mail, then needing anyone you want to talk to to have all these programs installed and an account at all these service providers. Just one nice’n'easy E-mail account that you can IM and call as well.

My $0.02.

AFAIK, that’s all it was ever doing, using the standard APIs for getting user info out of the sytem.

After all, the easy path would include running Internet Explorer, which thanks to the Chinese “Operation Aurora” is contraindicated.

I don’t really understand the “high quality” reference, that all depends on the codec that is used. The highest quality setting for Ventrilo is: Speex (32 KHz, 16 bit, 10 Qlty) 5520 bytes/sec

While both TeamSpeak and Ventrilo are descent clients, there isn’t really anything special. The most important features are that:

1) Everybody can host their own server 2) It has support for channels (trees) 3) You can bind voice communication to a key (or use voice activation)

It’s not exactly rocket science

You guys mentioned that you’re not too aware of what other tech is similar to skype.. and I see no mention of Ventrilo or Teamspeak in the discussion here.. These are generally used in the gaming sphere; unfortunately not open source and not extremely user friendly, but do have the ability to host high quality VOIP bitstreams..

For the general public, skype has made the idea of making voice calls over the Internet understandable. They have done that by making it zero-configurable and anticipating, then working around, the problems that the general public would have in making such calls. As you said, they made it just work. More importantly, I suspect that was their operating mantra.

I think it is possible for an open source project to still enter and flourish in this space. They just need to make the mantra “configurable, but usable with sensible defaults” their operating principle.

If they learn that lesson from Skype, they will thrive. Whether they “beat” skype at that point is somewhat moot. Skype does some stuff amazingly well, but there are surely niches that can be exploited by an open source VOIP solution that just works (and if you don’t like the defaults, it’s easy to get other options working as well).

4 years ago, my brother was living in China. I was in the US and only had a dial-up connection. We tried to use Skype–it was a disaster.

Then we tried Google Voice. It worked flawlessly.

Whether or not that’s a massive selling point, I don’t know.

What I do know is that, in my mind, Google Voice (audio over jabber?) is the superior solution.

Of course, I tried to hit somebody up via Empathy with it the other day (me on Ubuntu & Empathy, them on XP & Gmail) and it failed.

Maybe things have changed in the last 4 years

Otherwise, someone could come in and fill a niche Skype does not. e.g. Internet press conferences