Skype is cool, I gotta admit … but it ain't open source, & that's kind of troubling. You don't know what Skype is going to do with their network, & any time they decide to exert controls, users are out of luck. Fortunately, there's a neat new open source competitor that might be worth a look: Gizmo. Gizmo users can call other Gizmo users for free, and they can also call landlines & cells cheaply (starting at $0.018 per minute). In addition, landlines & cells can call Gizmo users at regular phone numbers for about $5/month. Best of all, Gizmo is based on the SIP open standard, & they've committed to connecting to other open VOIP systems as well. The software is currently available for Mac OS X & Windows XP/2k, with Linux versions coming soon. Sounds cool!
(Check out all of my posts on VOIP.)
1. The company Sipphone.com is behind Gizmo, and does not have a great history when it comes to reliability or customer-service. They are, however, very good at generating hype.
Also, Gizmo is not open source. The SIP protocol is an open standard (just like FTP or HTTP is), and Gizmo uses this protocol (just like internet explorer uses the HTTP open standard), but the source code for Gizmo is proprietary from all indications, and thus will suffer from the same weaknesses of other closed-source software.
I'd recommend finding truly open-source SIP phone software, and supporting its development instead of wasting time with Gizmo, where you cannot fix it if it breaks since you don't have the source code to work with.
Posted at 6:34AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Mark