Mandriva to ship Skype [LWN.net]

Mandriva to ship Skype

Posted Dec 21, 2005 20:17 UTC (Wed) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624)
In reply to: Mandriva to ship Skype by fergal
Parent article: Mandriva to ship Skype

But it's not open to all to use, it requires you to give a legal undertaking that Skype are free to use your CPU and bandwidth for Skype purposes (relaying other peoples calls). Users of corporate or academic networks usually do not have the right to do that and hence cannot properly agree to the EULA.

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Mandriva to ship Skype

Posted Dec 22, 2005 8:24 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

And from what I've heard, if you're behind a NAT firewall, it's technically impossible for Skype anyway.

So if you are a true internet host, you get hammered to make up for all the people who aren't. There was a report recently that said that a lot of such people were giving up on Skype because the load on their pipe degraded their call-quality to unacceptable levels.

Cheers,
Wol

Mandriva to ship Skype

Posted Dec 22, 2005 9:30 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

> And from what I've heard, if you're behind a NAT firewall, it's technically impossible for Skype anyway.

Nope, it worked nicely this way last time I checked. This way, though, it's guaranteed you won't spend a single byte of your bandwidth on anything except your own conversations (but someone else will).

> So if you are a true internet host, you get hammered to make up for all the people who aren't.

Unless if you have configured iptables properly... But it's unavoidable - either a significant part of the users are relaying, or the whole thing will collapse soon. Not only is this unavoidable, but it's a part of every normal society - people who make more money pay higher taxes to componsate for the quality of life of those who don't and/or can't work. Of course, there is a limit when taxes become a robbery. Usually, this never happens in a true democratic society. In the software world, an analogue of the true democracy is FLOSS. So don't get me wrong - I'm all against the proprierity software (of which Skype is just one) - but let's criticize it for this and not for technical solutions which are obvious. I'd be more than happy to use a FLOSS alternative to Skype, and probably there will be one soon.

> There was a report recently that said that a lot of such people were giving up on Skype because the load on their pipe degraded their call-quality to unacceptable levels.

Probably. I guess this is because of the (recently added) file-transfer option.