Skype

[Léon Brocard]

2009/9/17 Oliver Gorwits <oliver.gorwits at oucs.ox.ac.uk>:

> I'm not very familiar with Skype at all, but my understanding was
> that it is peer to peer in essence, if firewalls permit. If the
> firewalls don't permit, then so-called "supernodes" are used to
> relay calls, which are simply clients with more permissive firewall
> configs.

Wow, there have been a lot of vague opinions about Skype on this
thread. Luckily, people have done research on Skype:

  http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~salman/skype/

"An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol"
being the interesting one.

My point of view is that I think Skype is proprietary and would prefer
a more open approach but most VOIP things fail to get out of firewalls
or NATs whereas Skype Just Works.

Oh, and we won't spam the list, don't worry, Léon