Mandriva to ship Skype

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

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.