On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 02:26:25AM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: >>> That's what matters to me with Skype. It's a paying service anyway. >>> It might not even be possible to develop a free-software/open-source >>> solution for that because people might find ways to cheat -- I'm sure >>> that's a major concern. >> >> There are three kinds of expenses: the equipment, the bandwidth and >> the connection to POTS. There isn't much you can cheat on any of them >> before you can call it outright stealing. > > Obviously (I thought), the part I would think Skype would be concerned > about (with regard to free software) was the POTS aspect and billing. How is that different than you accessing a service provided by Comcast / Qwest using free software? You are using a standard protocol (TCP/IP) to connect to them. Can you download/upload faster/more than your contract? No, unless there is a misconfiguration on their part. > There is another thing that I didn't think to mention earlier -- they > have some kind of scheme where they use your bandwidth while Skype is > running in the background. Here's something about it: > > http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/02/24/skype-steals-bandwidth-%E2%80%94-even-when-you-are-not-using-it/ > > I once heard that it had something to do with routing calls, but I don't > know what they are doing. I keep it fully off unless I'm actually using > it or expecting a call. It is similar to bittorrent. Some of the 'lucky' users become routers routers and the voice data is routed in a peer-to-peer fashion from point A to point B. > It would be nice to have a free-software solution that allows POTS > billing and has a central registry to allow people to call to a computer. > What do you think? Can that be done? Sure. Use Asterix and a VOIP provider. There are/were people on the list who ditched their hard phone line and were making calls with VOIP. I have no VOIP-fu but I know that It is like Vonage, OOMA, etc but you don't get a piece of hardware from them, instead you use your own PC and VOIP phone. Cheers, florin -- Don't question authority! They don't know either. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20110511/78630e87/attachment-0001.pgp>