Skype is very well known software for those seeking to make video and audio calls to those they know, and is even handier considering it's available on Mac, PC and Linux. Now, however, the Linux community is about to get one step better: Skype will soon become open source.The news, initially reported by Olivier Faurax (link in French) and then Linux Crunch, came in the form of an email to Skype. It stated, "We understand that many users complain that there is no Mandriva version at present. We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community. Therefore Linux developers will be enabled to influence the development of the Skype client for Linux - which will most certainly result in specific versions for the different distributions." Linux Crunch then contacted Skype and received the following reply: "We appreciate our user community's enthusiasm and realize this is something they have been wanting for a while. We realize the potential of the open source community and believe that making Skype for Linux an open source application will help to speed up its development and enhance its compatibility with different versions of Linux. While it is our goal to make Skype for Linux source code available to the community in the nearest future, we are not at a point to disclose an exact release date yet."
As you'll see from this Skype announcement, the UI will be open source, whereas other parts of the software will remain closed. So, Linux users, expect to see a somewhat open source (and thus generally improved) version of Skype released in the not-too-distant future; this'll also mean, as mentioned, that the software will become available on a wider spectrum of Linux variations.
It says at the bottom that the UI will be open source but other parts are not going to be. I am not sure how a full Linux port is possible if they don't make all parts open source, unless they are going to be maintaining these parts themselves to work on all major distributions (Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Sun, Novell, etc.) and all architectures (AMD64,IA32, PPC(PS3), etc.)
It says at the bottom that the UI will be open source but other parts are not going to be. I am not sure how a full Linux port is possible if they don't make all parts open source, unless they are going to be maintaining these parts themselves to work on all major distributions (Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Sun, Novell, etc.) and all architectures (AMD64,IA32, PPC(PS3), etc.)
They just have to supply the libraries and that's it, probably just for amd64 and ia32.
If I'm not mistaken, the codec used by skype is proprietary, so it makes sense that it remains closed.
Our team at imo.im has already done that. You can use the skype features without actually downloading skype! Try it out at https://imo.im
Free as in beer, is not really free.
Not as in "libre" / freedom. :p
For a solution that's available now free and cross-platform, there's always ekiga softphone.
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.