Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Software Freedom Day: Hunt for Skype alternatives

[Sam Tuke]

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 14:57:10 Mike Dupont wrote:
> Mumble anyone? seems to work very well. is FLOSS,

Added to the list of clients to test, thanks for the suggestion.

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 15:03:17 Torsten Grote wrote:
> Don't forget to evaluate Jitsi. It works quite well for me.

Ditto above.

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 16:03:19 Andrea Di Dato wrote:
> It could be usefull - in this occasion or another - to test 
> interoperability too.
> I'm thinking to commercial and accademic SIP system like the various set 
> top box for videoconferencing - now almost all based on open standards 
> like SIP and H.323 - or network based MCU like the ones available in the 
> inter-universitary and research netoworks (I'm referring to the italian 
> GARR [1] or the Caltech EVO [2]).

Yes that would be useful to know, but I think that for this event, unless we 
have someone who's able to coordinate testing with these kinds of proprietary 
clients, we will stick with Free Software applications. Apart from anything 
else I expect most people to turn up running GNU/Linux (I may be wrong).

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 17:19:52 Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote:
> Sounds interesting. I'd like to test empathy with google talk and what
> should needs to be to setup your own server.

I think testing with Google talk is a good idea, even though it's no Free 
Software, because it is so widely and easily used, and uses Open Standards.

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 16:25:17 MJ Ray wrote:
> I also use linphone quite a lot,
> although the two programs require different (incompatible AFAIK)
> features from a SIP server.

They do use incompatible protocols, but both apps can be tested for 
compatibility with other clients from their respective fields.

> I'm not sure what I'll be doing Saturday and my new internet
> connection is still sorting itself out... but good luck to you
> and please let us know your findings via address@hidden

Will do.

On Thursday 13 Sep 2012 17:10:25 Dan MacDonald wrote:
> Linphone is the only FLOSS VoIP/vidfone app I've ever had decent
> results with but it uses SIP and many routers are funny with SIP so
> they often require config to work well with SIP. Anything that
> requires people start configuring network gear is instantly not
> consumer friendly if not a prob for most Linux/*nix users. The main
> prob with Linphone is it lacks encryption, or it did last time I
> checked.

I guess we'll see if it works without network config or not. I don't plan to 
fiddle with routers in order to fix issues. What we're looking for is out of 
the 
box compatibility.

> I've ended up just using Gtalk which seems to be using webrtc as its
> backend now. gtalk is non-free but webrtc is at least an open standard
> unlike Skype and there are FLOSS webrtc clients (some HTML5) in
> development.

Webrtc looks good - we can also test if chatting chromium to chromium works 
with this as the backend.

Thanks for all the input so far!

Sam.

-- 
Sam Tuke
Campaign Manager
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : address@hidden
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
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