Furthermore why do you should use programs they use and not vice-versa? You seem to choose proprietary protocols because you friend tell you to do so. It’s not you choice!

The sheer number of SIP servers (Asterisk or others) that I’ve used/called/etc.), and the flexibility therein blows Skype out of the water. I admit, Skype has one thing going for it, it has the user base and it’s drop dead dumb simple.

I will not use Skype anymore, for the same reason we’re doing is (yes, I’m beating a dead horse, I know). I refuse to set up an account on yet another service just to be able to talk to someone. I can set up my own SIP server and have the capability to dial PSTN AND SIP addresses. Best of both worlds. Imagine the ability to call anyone, via any medium, given a plain old phone number, or an e-mail-like address.

Skype does not give you that. Skype gives you a username, or “premium” callout, with freaking broken caller ID.

I’d be great if Skype opened up in any manner, especially if it did SIP. But that isn’t coming any time soon, I’m sure.

Background:
I live in Poland, where Gadu Gadu (abbr. GG) is the main player, or as I say the “Windows of IM” - it’s proprietary, and some 90% of people use solely this protocol for IM. The other 10% uses it anyway because of the majority. There’s also Skype, but it’s nowhere as popular for IM. I don’t use it at all. Jabber is next to non existent (including GTalk and one local open implementation).

I never use Skype, because I don;t need it. I wasn’t using GG for nearly a year, but gave up on it recently. Since I got back to the closed IM system I coverted more people to Jabber and I could talk numerous people into trying FLOSS substitutes and/or Linux.

Jabber will prevail, but not just yet. You have to talk people into using it. Especially in countries like Poland, where a single proprietary IM service has nearly 100% coverage. There are far more Linux users in here then people with active Jabber accounts. We’ve got GTalk on the light side, hopefully AOL/ICQ comes next. Talk about Jabber, ask about Jabber IM address first, put it in your signature. Evolution, not revolution.

Are you saying that if i continue to use YM i don’t truly support free software? Or what exactly is your point here? That i should spend countless hours of my very limited free time trying to explain my 50 years old aunt and other extremely computer illiterate friends why they wont be able to talk to me unless they install jabber? I really dont get it what’s so freaking wrong in using Skype when they are clearly miles ahead of anyone else in voice quality communication.

I find it ironic that you speak of freedom but try to force others to do something.

Think of it this way, would you want to only access some of the internet using IE? And only access the non-IE internet via Firefox?
No, one browser can (generally) access anything. It’s the same thing with IM and Voice. They make multi-protocol clients (Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda, etc.), and in general, technologies such as Jabber really help things along in the communication realm.

It’s the same as e-mail, you don’t use gmail in order to e-mail someone else on gmail, your e-mail is ubiquitous in terms of the ability to e-mail anyone, on any e-mail network.
So why don’t we do the same thing with IM?

@Vadim;
AIM and ICQ are going XMPP. Some folks have already connected to it with success. (The server has, however, gone down already, as it was only a test bed.)

Sticking with aim/google chat/jabber combination though - aim isn’t all that bad.

What starts out as someone’s pet project rarely evolves beyond that (at least for the individual that invented it), and unfortunately it leads to bad things in the core, great ‘complementary’ things. (The XFN parser thinger that compliments Open Social is great, Open Social itself is not.)

I don’t know if Jingle was a 20% time project, but you’re right, it hasn’t quite made it out.

Your post is unfortunately very short sighted, as I have seen great strides being made in the SIP world. It’s unfortunate, however, that SIMPLE is supposed to compliment SIP. SIP+XMPP (like GizmoProject pulls off) is freaking great. It’s so absolutely well done. Unfortunately, the other hand fell off, the client kinda sucks :P.

I like SIP, I like what’s being done with it. Asterisk, freePBX, the Flash Operator Panel for Asterisk is REALLY superb, Trixbox is going off on it’s own, etc.
There’s a lot of good things coming out, and I think all we need now is a rock solid, simple, easy, piece of cake SIP client. X-Lite is almost there, not there yet however. And now that Counterpath took hold, it’s slowing to a crawl.

After the aforementioned piece of cake client comes out, tie people’s ISP e-mail addresses, or any e-mail provider that also runs a PBX server (in order to get the e-mail-like addresses), and you have easy, logical, drop dead simple calls to anyone, from anyone, anywhere. (Except in Nations that are dumb and block SIP.)

The problem is that hosting a PBX server and managing the load is no small feat. It’s very VERY significant to your infrastructure. Just like Jabber, I think small groups will lead the charge, before we find a brilliant provider with the ability to roll out the service to the general masses.

There’s something to be said here about the Rails (Ruby) philosophy. “Convention over Configuration.” Sane defaults can take you a long way.

It’s funny to think of all these VoIP providers, and the fact that they don’t even offer SIP, for seemingly no good reason.

Now, two and a half years later… there isn’t a client that really works on Linux, there are lots of half-finished projects but there isn’t a single finished piece of software that gives you a decent experience. On top of that Google didn’t add any feaures to Google Talk.

The best VoIP cient on Linux… is Skype.

Neither Google nor the free software community did anything in the last two years worth mentioning concerning VoIP support for IM clients.

I am a free software and open standards advocate, but the whole Google Talk/Jingle thing shows, that open standards are not better by default.

If they got rid of them, I still don’t know that I’d use the official AIM client. After moving to anything else, the AIM interface seems so uninspired.

Also, my trained skimming eyes found something that made me laugh.
In spamllama’s last post, one of the things they said:
She isn’t going to care if its free or anything about the license or source code, she’s going to care whether she can paste a picture of Hanna Montana right off the clip board into an IM and send it to a friend at school. Her friend at school needs to be on the same service to receive the message. This friend also cares less about the software source than whether or not to get the pink case for her RAZR phone or a Hello Kitty Blackberry.

And then, to quote myself:
Do you see why we’re doing this yet?

Well that was pretty immature. Just because some of us have friends doesn’t mean we spend too much time on the computer. Maybe that’s the REASON we do have a lot of friends…and some of us have been on AIM since we were 13 years old.

Anyways, just because Jabber is “technically” superior doesn’t make anyone want to use it. Like I said, until it has a feature that people want to switch for or AOL starts charging money for AIM use, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing anyone to want to use it instead of they protocol that everyone else is on. Same reason I’m gonna keep using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, Adobe Reader, and an iPod. They plain work better. You’re posts are very shortsighted and naive and you should try having a little more respect for the people who actually read your blog. It feels like were getting scolded by someone at church.

This is the problem with the software community’s elite. Don’t loose sight of why software is made in the first place. No piece of software is ever going to be more important than my friends and family. Now my more technical friends generally have accounts on multiple services, but that certainly isn’t all of them.

You have to remember, things that work for greying, goateed, pudgy white guys like me may just not work for my teenaged daughter. She isn’t going to care if its free or anything about the license or source code, she’s going to care whether she can paste a picture of Hanna Montana right off the clip board into an IM and send it to a friend at school. Her friend at school needs to be on the same service to receive the message. This friend also cares less about the software source than whether or not to get the pink case for her RAZR phone or a Hello Kitty Blackberry.

This type of software especially plays to the lowest common denominator in the world of users. You said you would not endorse Pidgin, I am on the opposite end of that spectrum. Its not feature rich, but it sure does connect to AIM, MSN, GoogleTalk, and MySpace at the same time for me. Most of my more technical friends use Google’s instance of XMPP anyway, but that’s less than half my contacts. Its much more logical for me to support Pidgin being open source by using it than to demand that all my friends either switch to the same service I use or I won’t talk to them anymore. I would rather that the OSS software that I use is inclusive of various services than be exclusive away from my family and friends because of alligiance to a protocol.

Honestly, I thought that was one of the whole points of the OSS world. Be inclusive, be functional and talk to all formats but let people own their software, let people who have the ability contribute and make the platform available to all. If we start telling people what software they have to use, we’re no better than Microsoft who tries for force the same issue (for profit though it may be). That is why we alienate out potential users.

Like you said, people are resistant to change, don’t send them running in the other direction by invoking the software snobbery of telling them that they can’t talk to you anymore unless its through a specific channel. Like Tristan said, if the software is better and more feature rich to the point where it catches on and everyone wants to sign up because of some magical and compelling reason, then the market will take care of itself. Until then, you can’t force what isn’t going to happen on its own. Instead the people you’re really reaching out to just get annoyed…. which isn’t the way to sell something… even if its better - and free.