We waited a little while with this news, because we wanted official confirmation from Skype before jumping on the internet bandwagon. It's official now, so here we go: Skype has announced that it will release its Linux client as open source. A little late, but welcome nonetheless.
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Member since:2005-11-02
Who said anything about stability? Did the article say "We want better stability, so we're open sourcing the client UI?" No.
Stability, reliability, etc. may be incidental side effects of having many eyeballs debugging code, but it wont necessarily happen. And, importantly, that's not why we like open source. It's as much about freedom as it is about better software!
Not just FSF-style software Freedom, either. The ability to choose a desktop-integrated client is an example.
"Works for me and doesn't crash" isn't the ultimate justification for the existence of a piece of software!
Member since:2009-03-13
I suppose my comment wasn't geared towards the article itself but rather the general flavour of comments under this article. I'm all for free/(open source) software and I prefer it to any closed software when it delivers the functionality I need (none delivers the functionality of Skype), but reading through comments under this news one could gather what a terrible piece of software the Linux Skype client is, while I think it doesn't do much justice to it.
Member since:2007-09-06
Offhand, what distribution and are you running 32 or 64 bit?
For me, it works great on Maemo, iPhone and osX proper. On Mandriva it was ok but previous to my using it a lot. On Debian I'm getting no love from the 64bit without dirtying my install with 32bit dependencies. (so, no skype on my desktop)
Member since:2009-03-13
Member since:
2009-03-13
Skype for Linux works for me, I have it running 24h/day on two PCs in parallel, both run 100% stable. Granted, it's still the version with ALSA support and I have a hardware mixing SBLive ... but no, Skype doesn't crash AT ALL, in contrast to some open source KDE programs. :o Open source does not imply stability. The only thing I really can complain is disappearing buttons in fullscreen video calls. Overall I think it's a good program with useful UI. I am happy with it getting open so that the minor issues can be quickly resolved.