Free software is definitely going strong in some areas, especially in the server market. However, there are other areas where free software and free protocols have failed. Internet based voice and video communication is one of those areas. The market is basically fully owned by Skype, a piece of proprietary software based on a proprietary (and abusive) protocol in the hands the same company that runs eBay. Free software advocates have been saying "what if Skype was discontinued?" for years. Then I read about eBay considering shutting Skype down. Pardon?
Full story »
Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
Categories
Best karma users
From the staff of FSDaily: Comedians in Perth, Magicians in Perth, Bands in Perth
Ferk
2 years 42 weeks 2 days 9 hours ago
XMPP for the win
XMPP Jingle p2p communication is far better than SIP and perhaps even better than Skype.
Empathy and now Psi (which also works in Windows) could be nice replacements for Skype.
I think that this should be the logical choice. Also, XMPP is also bound to many other free services not related to voice/video that I think would really benefit from the triumph of Jingle.
Mr. Psychopath
2 years 41 weeks 3 days 20 hours ago
Re: XMPP for the Win
Totally agree with you on this. For the last few years, I had a jumble of contacts across many different messenger protocols, as well as contacts on Skype. Hopefully, with the upcoming stuff being doing with Jingle developers will be able to implement the protocols across the many various Free Software instant messengers out there.
My biggest gripe with the most popular ones (Pidgin, Kopete, Empathy perhaps) is that they don't fully implement XMPP as much as I'd like. File transfer from Gajim to Kopete or Pidgin to Gajim doesn't always work, and it's that lack that I think is holding back XMPP/Jabber. I'd really like to see developers use a more robust XMPP library that is up-to-date with the latest features.