Re: [Ekiga-list] Ekiga.net discontinued

["Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart gathman org>]

On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Bret Busby via ekiga-list wrote:

> On 02/12/2018, Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com> wrote:
> > Due to the lack of time, and to the last outages, I have taken the
> > decision to discontinue EKIGA.NET before the end of the year.

> I am wondering whether, given that Ekiga is said to be open source,
> rather than, as its owner, simply shutting it down, it would not be
> more appropriate and consistent with the (perceived) nature of open
> source,, to seek a new group of people, to take it on, for the sake of
> its continuance.

Ekiga.net is not needed for peer to peer calls.  It is only to help
out unfortunate souls still in IP4 NAT jail because they haven't learned
how to join the IP6 world.  ISPs will never offer IP6.  You have to
peer with friends and/or sign up with a general tunnel broker like
he.net.

There are other sites offering free IP4 SIP call brokering (generally
charging for POTS connections to make their money).

I moved to Linphone (another open source SIP client) because it
supported IPv6.  Peer to peer SIP really requires IPv6.

The Cjdns IPv6 mesh VPN allows authenticated, encrypted peer to peer calls 
anywhere in the world without any exchange of certs, etc, and a device
keeps its IP as it moves around.  The IPv6 is a hash of the public key
of the node.

Even without a VPN, IPv6 allows direct peer to peer without needing 
a public IP4 or a centralized site to help with all the NAT workarounds.

Ekiga does a number of things better than linphone (e.g. addressbook).
But the lack of IPv6 was a deal killer.  There were efforts to
add IPv6 support to ekiga, but never finished that I was aware of.
Actually, IPv6 support in Linphone is a pain - it can't listen on
IP4 (for commercial SIP to POTS services) and IP6 simultaneously.
You have to switch back and forth in preferences.  Ekiga could do it so
much better.

--
              Stuart D. Gathman <stuart gathman org>
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.