Friday, May 27, 2011

IIT, IIM faculty not world-class: Jairam Ramesh | India Education Review

IIT, IIM faculty not world-class: Jairam Ramesh | India Education Review

IBlog-Real Team

IBlog-Real Team

IBlog-Real Team

IBlog-Real Team

Ekiga ~ Free Your Speech

Ekiga ~ Free Your Speech

Telephony - Free Software Directory - Free Software Foundation

Telephony - Free Software Directory - Free Software Foundation

Bye Bye Skype, Top 3 Free Replacements

http://ostatic.com/blog/bye-bye-skype-top-3-free-replacements

Skype has always been proprietary so those that prefer to use only Open
Source have relied upon free alternatives. Now with Microsoft's purchase of
Skype, Linux users are already predicting the end for them and are looking
for alternatives as well. It turns out that the Free Software Foundation has
had "Free software replacement for Skype" on their
High-PriorityList
for a while.

The FSF suggests that folks use one of the free programs available for Linux
and help development by sending in bug reports. They cite China's spying on
Skype conversations as a good reason. Does anyone doubt Microsoft is capable
of similar? So, even if Microsoft doesn't give Linux (and Mac) users the
kibosh, I wouldn't trust them and proprietary software with my phone calls.

Quite an extensive list of
alternatives is already compiled at the FSF, some of which I'd never heard
of before. But several bring a familiar ring - if you'll pardon the pun.

1. Linphone - Linphone is an internet phone or
VoIP much like Skype. It seems the page at the FSF needs a bit of updating,
because Linphone 3.4.0 was released in February 2011. The news page states
that "the main point of this new release is support for multiple
simultaneous calls, with pause, resume and transfer functionality." It is
released under the GNU GPL v2 license and commercial support is available as
well. It comes in binaries for Debian-based distros or build from source.
Here's a screenshot from the Linphone Website:

2. Ekiga - Ekiga was formerly known as GnomeMeeting,
which many have heard of. GnomeMeeting used to come with lots of
distributions and Ekiga is still seen in several. So, check your
distribution's repos. It provides "SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant
Messenger application[s] over the Internet" and supports SIP and H.323.
Ekiga is released under the GPL and comes in binaries for lots of distros
and in source code. Again, scarfed screenshot from Ekiga Website:

3. Empathy - "Empathy is a messaging program
which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many
different protocols." This one is probably most well known because of its
inclusion in Ubuntu. 3.1 was released May 9. It is released under the GPL
and comes in binaries for Ubuntu. Looks like others will have to build it
from source. Again, shamelessly stolen screenshot: