For years, I’ve been using Jabber for all my IM needs. There is a private jabber server here, it runs several transports, so there was no problem to keep connectivity with people.
… until recent. Looks like now everybody is moving to skype. Quite a few of my contacts no longer use anything else. This is starting to cause problems.
I feel quite discomfortable about moving to proprietary software that is a questionable quality (1) implementation of a secret protocol. But pressure increases: staying away from skype already does cause difficulties.
(1) After recent unclean shutdown of server that hosts desktop sessions for thin clients here, quite a few users have been unable to login to Skype without erasing entire ~/.Skype directory.
And there is no working jabber transport for skype.
Bad.
I’m aware that some multi-protocol IM clients can talk skype via api provided by official skype client. This is better than nothing, but still uncomfortable.
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