Skype may have had all the hype recently but it’s not the only player in town. Despite Skype being an easy app to run, it is a closed protocol and so goes against my desire to use as much open source software as I can. When making the recent move to FreeBSD/Gnome for my desktop I opted for an AMD 64 processor, which means that as Skype don’t release a suitable 64-bit binary I can’t even run it!

However, as I said, Skype isn’t the only player in town for VoIP and thankfully some of the others have open source versions that are happy to work on AMD 64. I’ve installed linphone which provides for VoIP using SIP. After some experimentation it seems to be working but until I try and call someone else with a SIP phone I won’t really know 🙂