[okfn-discuss] Sysadmin sessions on IRC + skype

Tue Jul 19 20:47:03 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Daniel Dietrich
<daniel.dietrich at okfn.org> wrote:
> Exactly because of the importance of the issue, lets try to not make this an ideological debate.

But that's the whole point isn't? Ideology is the whole argument here
- that's not necessarily a bad thing but in this case its a trade-off
against usability and network participation. If any SIP services
actually worked much nicer than Skype I'd be the first to support this
move, but they aren't: lack of user discovery, cumbersome
configuration, tunneling issues, audio quality, codec incompatibility,
crappy chat (or chat on a completely different channel, then: need to
exchange two contacts instead of one), awkward group audio chats
(rooms vs. click on 'call all') - and this is not even counting the
network problems: how many of our partners and clients would actually
install a SIP client, get an account somewhere configure and learn
things just to talk to us? I wouldn't.

> Lets try find solutions suitable for our needs. This might mean a "step by step" approach. BBB is a nice bridge for those who don't want to configure their own SIP client themselves.

Again: it doesn't survive the ideological test.

- Fr.