Skype under Fedora-10

[Kevin Kofler]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> I fail to see how my using Skype takes anyone else's freedom away, there
> are dozens of phone vendors, my choice of Skype does not impact their
> choice in the slightest, they pick up a phone and call me. That's any
> phone, land line, cell, SIP, you name it and they can use it. Or do you
> mean my choosing to use a phone of any type blocks their freedom to use
> mental telepathy or whatever?

And that way they have to pay for the phone call. :-/ If they want to talk
to you over VoIP, they're locked into Skype and thus proprietary software.
(Well, I guess they could use your phone number to call you through a SIP
PBX, but then both they and you have to pay for the call.)

> As for abusing my bandwidth, don't I see you telling people to use
> bittorrent? How is helping move Fedora I get for free good and helping
> move VOIP I get for free bad? Oh, because Skype is not open source, that's
> right.

I actually see HTTP mirrors as the best solution, but indeed, giving
bandwidth to Fedora is helping Free Software, giving bandwidth to Skype is
hurting it.

> I think you have bought into the 64 bit thing just like the Open Source
> crusade. At this point 64 bit does not provide any significant benefit for
> most users, in terms of better performance or must-have applications which
> need more than 4GB for the application. What it *does* provide is a chance
> to litter your system with tool chains and libraries so you can build
> applications which are open source but have no 64 bit binaries. Oh, and
> you can find out who made what assumptions which make the app not work
> right in 64 bit.

Applications which are Free Software just need to get packaged in Fedora,
then they automatically have 64-bit binaries. The real solution is to get
all the software with appropriate licensing into the repository.

        Kevin Kofler (happy user of KDE 4, currently 4.2.3, and PulseAudio)