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