Jingle a better VoIP standard than SIP
Gervase Markham has a nice
rant on how complicated SIP is.
Jingle on Jabber is a much nicer solution if you're not a
telecommunications person yourself. It's an open standard that's
much simpler than SIP which makes it easier to implement, and there
are open source libraries available that provide support, and it is
Jabberish which is sensible and makes all the confederation work
nicely. It addresses some of the technical issues that make people
seem to like Skype (getting through firewalls etc) without having
some of its headaches (proxying other people's phone calls through
your computer, a totally mad idea).
The main issue is that the only current final-release program
available with support is Google Talk; it's not open source and its
only available on Windows.
I'm currently recommending
Google
Talk to Windows-using friends in the hope that the best
solution will win.
There are also a few emerging services for doing Jingle-to-Phone
calling:
gtalk2voip seems
to work well, I've also seen
jabphone. gtalk2voip apparently now
also support
SIP
interoperability (which is only described as currently free of
charge).
And it seems like
Asterisk Jingle support is on the way too...
In terms of open source support, Patches / Branches are available
for
Psi,
Kopete and Gaim (although that one's a bit more tricky to get
working). See my blog on
building Psi and Kopete on Fedora Core 4. Neither were too
complex, and that was a few months ago.
Unfortunately all of these patches/branches are languishing in
we'll-finish-that-at-an-undetermined-date mode, as the projects are
busy doing other things and so on. Yet they all seemed to work
reasonably well, a lot of the remaining work is cleanup and merging
to the main branch etc. (The one most likely to emerge in the
official version is Kopete as its in 0.12, which is in Beta. But
I'm not sure whether it'll be included in official builds on
various distros...)
There are a number of proposals out there to do more work as part
of
Summer of Code, and I
think it would be great if people signed up for these:
Jingle Audio
Jingle Video
Kopete Jingle Support