skype shoots self in foot

[Randy Bush <randy () psg com>]

skype seems to have made the latest 6.x incompatible with 2.8 (which
folk who care about screen real estate run) in that video no longer
works between them.

until widespread availability of webrtc, a bunch of us are using
jitsi for video, https://jitsi.org/ 
  o uses open standard protocols
  o free, open source, apple pie, ...
  o supports opus codec which has really good performance across a
    wide range of bandwidth http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
  o multi-participant video on xmpp-based videobridge, also open
    source
  o does xmpp, sip, aim, icq, yahoo, ...

i have an ejabberd+videobridge up if folk want test/use accounts.
and it's easy to put up your own, of course.

and while you are looking at escaping other big company servers,
check out http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html, real
peer to peer dropbox.

randy