on Skype and OpenWengo
On my recent post mentioning Kopete’s skype plugin, I got a comment:
OpenWengo (http://OpenWengo.org) is completely open source (GPL), uses Qt for its GUI, and has a better voice quality than Skype.
This comment is very valuable, as it touches a very sensitive topic. I already got some flames by fanatics on my blog just because mentioning non-free software on previous posts (like Flash). This time the comment was in the right approach, link and promote the free alternative.
I fully agree OpenWengo is the way to go. I already know OpenWengo and I have some credit in my wengo account. To be honest I have never been able to make it work well, but to be honest I haven’t tried really hard. Well, a user should not spend time trying. But definitly Wengo is the way to go.
Now, messaging systems are social networks, so the value of it it is not given only by it’s license, toolkit, or whatever, but some function on the number of people using it. I am a Jabber user sice long time. But I was never able to use Jabber until Google transformed it into a product, because Jabber before that was a technology, not a product, and there were not massive products based on it around.
Same happens with Word files. Why even KWord tries hard to import them, why do we care? because even if .doc sucks, the word processing document is part of a business social network were thousands of employees and private people use(missuse) it for information exchanging (and virus exchanging). The value is there. So OpenWengo works fine to call a normal phone. But go and try to convince all your friends to abandon Skype. You can’t because if your friends are not in a SIP based system then you can’t talk to them, but your friends have exactly reason to not to switch.
The right thing would have been not to allow proprietary centralized systems like MSN, Skype, etc to grow like they did. But they did and lot of people use it. You won’t win the battle telling your friends “hey jabber is much better it is xml it is open and opensource blahblah”, “Who can I talk with?” (before gtalk) “ehmm… with the author of the client?”.
We will have to provide some kind of support to closed technologies that have high social lock-in. Then you make the open alternative rock more, and then is when the average use does viral marketing to convince friends. Not before.
So the reason for somebody to implement a Skype plugin for Kopete is not to enjoy Skype cpu usage, and it’s proprietary protocol, but just being able to talk with people that is not going to switch yet. It just allow you to integrate your Kopete contact list with skype contacts, and doing the calls over skype.
Going back to wengo. I am interested to know how can we use its VoIP component only in Kopete, because the new WengoNG seems to replicate a full messaging client, including support for the common proprietary networks.
The right answer would be “You can talk with everybody as soon as you use a Jabber transport.”
Eckhart
23 Oct 06 at 10:27 am
Bullshit. Technically, yet, but.
As I said, google is the only one that has been able to bring jabber to the masses, because it is a product, not something you have to understand to use it. Jabber technology is great, but it is a technology.
You won’t see a normal, non-geek user using Jabber unless he does not know he is using jabber.
Jabber is a valid solution for us. I can setup a transport, and choose or install a server with transports. But the average user has to stick with the network with highest social value.
duncan
23 Oct 06 at 10:58 am
I once got openwengo (the classicphone rather than NG) working on use 9.something and the sound quality was great. I never got it running again on any later version though - there seems to be a limited amount of linux packaging knowledge in the project - they used to have rpms for some specified version of fedora and these lacked vital dependency information so you’d install it fine and not get it to run becuase something was missing (googling for the dependencies soon loses its appeal). THere was also a lack of tarballs to make it easy for distro maintainers to step in and do it for them - I seem to remember someone from debian(?) on the forums a while ago requesting that and getting nowhere.
The core voip engine seems good though, so it would be great to see that reused in kopete. Othern projects of interest could include http://www.gizmoproject.com/ and http://www.twinklephone.com both of which are oss (gpl I think). I use twinklephone mainly, on the wengo sip network as it works better than their client, i.e. it works sometimes
Wengo are good in that sense, there is info on the forums on using other clients. Twinklephone has the advantage, i guess, of not being hardcoded to any particular service providers settings.
Btw, please continue to post and comment on closed source apps - it is interesting to see what else is out there and there is inovation and ideas in clsoed source apps that we can learn from, just as the opposite is true. I’d rather use a free alternative than skype (and I’d rather use gnash than flash) but the reality is that I use both wengo and skype becuase most of my contacts are on skype and frankly will not abandon their many contacts on skype just to keep me happy (I have switched a few people to wengo).
Simon
23 Oct 06 at 11:51 am
Openwengo works well under Gentoo. The only problem I had was getting my video camera working, but I think that\’s because it requires a fairly new driver and v4l2 support.
Miles Barr
23 Oct 06 at 4:39 pm
First of all: I appreciate the work of companies done to port their apps over to another platform to support the community of that platform. Therefore I appreciate everyone porting or developing an application to Linux. When its Open Source, even better, but Closed Source running on Linux is still nice. So: keep on posting, I like it, and I read it. And I do the same, btw
Second: I get these “Wengo is cooler than Skype” comments also every time I write something about Skype. And I disagree! Baiscally I think that the idea of battling a P2P VoIP solution with a SIP VoIP solution is not realistic. To set up a SIP client can be a real pain - an I never heard anyone having problems setting up Skype. The better option here would be the GoogleTalk (or correct: jingle) extension to Jabber: it is also P2P VoIP and therefore very easy to set up.
About Wengo and including Wengo into Kopete: kopete lacks a SIP connection at the moment - there are many solutions out there, and Wengo is just one of them. Btw., it is said that even the jingle library for Google Talk can handle the SIP part, but that’s maybe just for the development version.
To summarize it: don’t bother with the extremists, just delete them - and for the others: keep on with your posts, I like to read about software on Linux.
liquidat
23 Oct 06 at 5:07 pm
Liquidat,
Actually, OpenWengo is just as easy to use as Skype — they both work out of the box even you have a firewall.
Sure, if you want to set up your own server then you have to open up some ports, but you can just use OpenWengo’s central server and there is absolutely no network configuration needed!
Bill
23 Oct 06 at 5:47 pm
Bill: OpenWengo is using the SIP protocol, right? Yes, so there is no “as easy to use as”. Please read first the article and discussions I linked. There are some situations listed where SIP does not work out of the box. Think of simple home dsl-routers, think of several SIP based telephones behind a simple home router, and so on. Btw: It doesn’t matter if you talk about OpenWengo, Ekiga or something else - all SIP based systems are basically the same. The main difference for OpenWengo seems to be the marketing.
And before you think about mentioning UPnP: read the linked text and discussion. There are some more information about that topic as well.
Not to mention personal experiences and experiences from other users…
liquidat
23 Oct 06 at 9:19 pm
I must say I have the same frustrating experiences with Wengo, it looks quite okay, but getting it to work and finding the dependencies can take some work (and newer version just don’t work anymore on my system).
So I took a look at Twinkle (http://www.twinklephone.com). It is not much of a looker but it works quite well. It’s not too big and works in KDE or just with plain Qt (without some features like KAddressbook integration) so it might be a better candidate for integration with Kopete.
Quintesse
24 Oct 06 at 3:29 pm