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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

Note to self: when organizing a debate, pick a subject on which some of the participants disagree.

The supposedly big news yesterday was Skype suggesting that their Linux client will be liberated shortly. However, I feel that in communications, open, standard protocols are more important than client implementations, so the news did not make all that big an impression.

The correct way to handle VoIP calls is using open protocols such as SIP or XMPP, no matter how the client side is arranged. Gizmo and Google have gotten this right: both have their own respective desktop and mobile clients, while the protocols are standard enough to allow us to hack together our own client implementations such as Empathy or Ekiga.

I wanted to see how our distinguished community feels about this and decided to start a debate on #ubuntu-offtopic. I failed miserably, and the discussion ended up being rather short. Please allow topyli and gord to demonstrate, if you will.

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