After the massive disruption over the weekend, I read several resources about Skype – and decided that this closed-source crap has nothing to do on my box. I therefore switched back to plain old IM – using my almost forgotten ICQ account (8624280) and Yahoo ID (tkhobbes, what else…)
Within Gentoo Linux, I use kopete (which, btw, needs the “yahoo” USE-flag in order to connect to Yahoo IM infrastructure), and on Windows, I just use ICQ and the Yahoo messenger.
Anyone who used to chat with me via Skype – go on, deinstall the software and use some IM… and if you REALLY need VoIP, use something like Gizmo.
There is nothing wrong with Skype, there was a bug in their software which made the servers crash after a huge number of Windows client machines rebooted after Windows Updates and tried to reconnect all at once. “Closed source crap” is uncalled for and this is no reason to stop using the software.
I have read the official statement of Skype. I am not sure on whether to believe what they say – and here comes the “closed source crap” into the game, because it is simply not possible to tell what is going on – neither the client nor the protocol are open, so how do you know what they transfer? How do you know what is going on?
You don’t.
Now, I realise that both ICQ and Yahoo also are closed source clients – but at least you can use their protocol with other IM clients as well.
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@Vitaliy,
Everything is wrong with Skype. Their client app sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it.
This massive crash was only the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can only hope that more people turn to Open Standards and Choice because of this.