Thanks. This is exactly the kind of clear, technical answer I needed.
Thanks again,
Michael
On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Ilya Konstantinov wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm afraid I don't have an answer to your question, but I'd like to
learn more about Skype. What do they do that makes them evil?
What makes Skype evil? The fact that they strongly oppose interoperatibility,
by encrypting their protocol and making it extremely hard to reverse-engineer
it. It's the same story as it is with any unpublished format aiming to become
a defacto standard, e.g. the Microsoft Word file format, Windows Media Video
encoding ... only unlike Microsoft, they not only avoid publishing the
protocol but also intentionally make reverse engineering for sake of
interoperatibility difficult.
Once such a program becomes the defacto standard (= your friends and
relatives expect you to use it to have a conversation):
1. You'd loose the freedom to use a different program to talk to your friends
and relatives if the official Skype program doesn't suit you. Nowadays, if
you hate ICQ's official program, you can use Trillian, Gaim etc. With Skype,
you couldn't.
2. If you're a programmer, you'd loose the freedom to improve the program you
use for Skype, conversations, because there'll be only one program, Skype's
official program, which is not open-source.
3. Even if their program or service changes for the worse, you'd still have
to keep using it: after all, they've "locked in" all your friends.
P.S. For once, I don't care about them electing not to use a "standard
protocol" such as SIP. It's a legitimate technical decision.
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