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.
14 Responses to “Skype everywhere”
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Many people move to Skype because they don’t know that Jabber (AKA Google Talk, XMPP, and these days Windows Messenger) will do voice and video calls. Consider pointing this out to them, and making sure it works with your Jabber server.
The bad thing is that every alternative (Jingle aka Google Talk or SIP) often has a lot of problems if you are located behind a firewall. I never had problems to create a Skype connection no matter how strict the firewall was. But trying the same with Jingle or SIP (e.g. with the help of a STUN server) can be quite challenging if not impossible. I don’t know what Skype does different, but Jingle and SIP have to provide something similar to be a real alternative. That’s sad but for a general use on a day to day basis necessary.
Works fine here even with both ends firewalled/NATted.
> Works fine here even with both ends firewalled/NATted.
What exactly works for you? Google Talk from the web browser? That’s probably possible if it goes through the Google servers. With normal SIP and/or Jabber clients my experience is that it is quite hard or even impossible to get it working behind firewalls.
For example there is no way to connect with Linphone (SIP) on my Android phone when I’m connected to the wireless network of my university. On the other hand Skype works flawlessly in the same environment.
Well, if all your contacts are just doing zero effort to keep contact with you using an open protocol, why on earth are you doing effort to move to a proprietary protocol?
Because I need to keep connectivity?
Dropping connectivity only because peer does not care about openness is sometimes silly, and sometimes pure unacceptable.
> Because I need to keep connectivity?
is this one-sided or both-sided requirement? I know it it often hard and sometimes even silly to insist on you choice but the same question can be asked the people switching to Skype. If they switch to skype and risk loosing contact to you I wonder how important the contact is for them?
I’m face often the same problem. Sometimes I agree to use Skype. For example if I join a working group which already established this kind of communication. It would be silly and impossible to insist that they have to follow me, the new guy in their group. But than I use it only for the tasks I really need it and switch it off for the rest of the time. But If I’m connected to people by Jabber and they decide to switch e.g. to Skype I don’t see why I should care about them If they don’t care about me.
There are people who keep jabber client running especially to communicate with me. And this annoys them and they constantly ask me to switch “as everybody does”.
Overall trend is – people do go to skype, claiming that it works better for them.
For other IM systems, there was an answer – jabber transports. This allowed everyone to use what he likes.
However skype is different – there is no transport (Karaka does not work and is dead long ago) and most likely none will appear because skype is actively enforcing closeness of their protocol.
Here is how my canned reply: «Sorry, I have a problem with my company firewall, they do not let Skype work… Can we use the google chat? Haven’t you got a GMail account?». Works most of the times.
Don’t do it!
Hi, I’ve recently hacked together an XMPP to Skype transport for Openfire (https://github.com/lemmy/kraken-gateway). Works good enough for small amounts of XMPP users using the transport. It requires a running Skype client per user with which it communicates over dbus.
Thanks for the link, I’ll definitely look at it
The problem is that from user perspective, Skype is simply better in most aspects. It requires no configuration short of choosing a name and password, even behind firewalls. If you have multiple instances, they all receive the messages (quite important feature if you e.g. use it from work and from home). It does not seem to loose messages like XMPP (over SSL tunnel from behind a proxy (that broke the connection now and than) it was unusable). And it can make a voice call to any peer. Mind you, we also have SIP server at work, but the Windows clients insist on SRTP and I have not yet found a free client that would support it, so I can’t use it for voice calls from Linux anyway (we use it for sharing screen, because it’s better in Office Communicator, but not for calls, because it does not allow clients to reconnect to a call in progress and it’s IM sucks big time). So until there is an open-source system that is actually on par with Skype feature-wise, most people will keep using Skype.
Google talk is much simpler, and Hangouts just work. Skype gives me pixelated goo and at best echoing sound (if any) before crashing. Since we do a lot of conferencing, it doesn’t usually require much to have everybody use google hangouts instead of skype. Every now and then there are people who only know skype, but this seems to be changing slowly. Hopefully third party hangout plugins will eventually make it to instant messaging apps.