Voice over IP clients

Phil Wolf [1] has it in use and I have not even heard about it; Skype [2]. Slashdot has an article on it too. Skype is yet another VoIP (Voice over IP) client software – currently provided freely – as a Beta version. The team behind this tool is based on Kazaa people and many of their implementations of details, such as the protocol are proprietary. The Slashdot discussion points out some alternative solutions. Speakeasy is one of them. John Walker – the founder of Autodesk – coded Speakfreely some years ago. John Walker [4] recently made a \”End of Life Announcement\” of this software as its first release dates back to 1991:

Speak Freely shows its age. The code is messy, difficult to understand, and very easy to break when making even small modifications. The Windows and Unix versions, although interoperable, have diverged in design purely due to their differing histories, almost doubling the work involved in making any change which affects them both.

But as John Walker opensourced the code, it is available for further development on Sourceforge. And if the

voip makes noise like cat > /dev/audio

… have a look at this thread [5] 😉

[1] http://dijest.com/aka/2003/09/19.html#a2614
[2] http://www.skype.com
[3] http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/14/2025203.shtml
[4] http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
[5] http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.os.linux.misc/2003-08/1023.html

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