Skype is the principle way that I communicate with my distant wife, and so is of great personal interest. However, its acquisition by MS raises concerns. Will advertising for MS or third parties be embedded? Will MS mine data for my skype name or other information and sell it to a third party? While that information is public, MS control of the Skype network exposes it to predatory policies.
I would like to see a GNU client and network service that does the same thing as Skype, but without stings to MS. Is that possible? China has its own TOM network, but apparently had to get permission for it. Skype uses a VoIP protocol that is said to be proprietary, and so too is its audio codec, although there are older codecs that are apparently not proprietary. And yet a skype application is part of debian, which suggests that it is not only free but open. There are many cases where an application is back engineered and renamed (gnash for Flash), but yet the debian application is named "skype". So is the Linux skype client proprietary or not? Then there is the question of the network used by Skype. I'm also ignorant here, but get the impression that Skype connects to a SIP VoIP server, and that such servers are proprietary, first owned by Skype, then eBay, now MS. This would seem to open the possibility of MS closing access to non-MS users, data mining, or charging a usage fee. And yet there's quite an array of SIP servers (http://www.sipcenter.com/sip.nsf/html/Service+Providers). I happen to use AT&T as my ISP, and see that their SIP service is business class. Would a buiness class service with, for example, AT&T, prevent MS predation? Haines Brown _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss