Skype 1.0 available

Skype pretty much just works -- that's why people use it.

Correct. This does not make it a non-obstacle.

If someone could package an open standards based app with more or less equivalent functionality, that dealt with firewalls as well as Skype, I'd be all over it.

You might. Ordinary users would keep using their Skype. After all, "it works", they're familiar with it, and its free in the sense most can understand. Thus leaving any hypothetical competitor in the fringe.

Sure, Skype got there first, and Skype (apparently) works. This is not contested. It's simply, IMAO, a bad thing for it to have gotten there first, and it'd be on the whole better if there was no nat/fw-traversing alternative widely available. In that case things like SIP could gain some more ground, even if not as much as Skype has now. And probably someone would kludge it to work without incoming sockets through server proxies at some point.

If my line of thinking in considering a proprietary VOIP thing worse than nothing is difficult to grasp, think "E-mail" instead of "VOIP" and rehash. Not nice.

Which definition of limited are you using?

"Confined within limits; narrow; circumscribed; restricted" - Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913).

Restricted is a nice definition, particularly. As in "Skype restricts what you can talk to your friends with". Smartphones? Nah. Linux/PPC? No way. BSD's? Well, on x86, with emulation, I suppose.

Non-antisocial software? Nope.

I am an open source advocate but credit where it's due and VOIP is going to be a BIG market, lots of room for everyone.

I give them some technical credit (not a lot, since, well, it's impossible to tell how much I should), but no credit for creating something that should be used. However, I am willing to concede that if at some point there will be public SIP <-> Skype gateways and/or free reimplementations with no active pursuit of incompatibilities or legal measures to take them down on Skype's part, then there would be some room for it in my book.

If M$ ported Office to Linux tomorrow I suspect you would be part of the brigade complaining it wasn't standards compliant and open sourced.

Nah. I wouldn't bother, MS Office has been complained to death (sadly, not actual). I would, however, grudgingly mention that it is available to people for whom that was an apparent issue. As I do with Skype.

Imagine if you purchased a phone line from "Telco A", and then learned that you could only use that phone line to talk to other customers of the telco. If you wanted to phone a friend hooked up to "Telco B", you'd need to order a phone line from them too (which would have a different phone number). Also imagine that you needed a different handset for each telco's phone line because they all used different wiring/electrical standards.

From a customer point of view, this is a hassle, since they would need a different phone line from each telephone network they wanted to communicate on, and would essentially have separate identities on each network.

From the point of view of an established telco, this is great since it means that anyone who wants to talk to their customers will have to become a customer too. And it will be hard for a competitor to break into the market, since they won't have a customer base to start with, so there will be no incentive for people to become customers. And if there are no competitors, there isn't much need to improve your products ...

This is quite similar to the world of proprietary VoIP protocols. If you instead use products based on an open protocol like SIP or H.323, you get many of the benefits of today's telephone networks, including:

• Choice of client software. Small companies or new open source projects can appear and provide clients with great new features that can be used to communicate with the existing user base.
• You only need a single identity, and are not limited to talking to people using one company's VoIP system.
• Just as you can easily switch between long distance providers with regular phones, there are multiple companies providing gateway services between VoIP and conventional phone networks, and you can easily switch between them.

As far as MS Office documents go, there are multiple applications that cam read those document types, so it isn't as big a deal. I'd complain if Microsoft started changing the formats in ways designed to kill its competitors (I'd guess a number of Microsoft customers would too, who have a lot of important information tied up in those file formats).