Open source, business, marketing, community
Skype open source. Not!

Skype open source. Not!

Skype open source? Reading the full announcement on Skype blog:

[…]Having an open source UI will help us […]

So, it’s not Skype being open sourced, but it’s only the UI. The full sentence should be:

Having an open source UI will help us further our [Skype’s] plans to monopolize the Voice Over IP market with a proprietary and secret protocol that nobody can interoperate with. [Evil laugh]

I wish Google released a fully free and open source Gtalk, server included.

6 Comments

  1. That’s also my understanding. The UI is totally irrelevant (and it is also quite badly designed, IMHO). The protocols are the real stuff (are they so innovative? I beg to doubt it, it’s just voice compression AFAICT).

    So what are they “giving away”? Nothing! They are just playing the open source buzzword without believing a single word of what Free Software means.

  2. Pingback: Carlo Piana (carlopiana) 's status on Monday, 02-Nov-09 17:17:01 UTC - Identi.ca

  3. Pingback: Stefano Maffulli (smaffulli) 's status on Tuesday, 03-Nov-09 07:49:51 UTC - Identi.ca

  4. Pingback: Saqer A (saqeram) 's status on Thursday, 05-Nov-09 17:02:45 UTC - Identi.ca

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *