Gizmo is a Free Phone for Your Computer
Skype is cool, I gotta admit … but it ain’t open source, & that’s kind of troubling. You don’t know what Skype is going to do with their network, & any time they decide to exert controls, users are out of luck. Fortunately, there’s a neat new open source competitor that might be worth a look: Gizmo. Gizmo users can call other Gizmo users for free, and they can also call landlines & cells cheaply (starting at $0.018 per minute). In addition, landlines & cells can call Gizmo users at regular phone numbers for about $5/month. Best of all, Gizmo is based on the SIP open standard, & they’ve committed to connecting to other open VOIP systems as well. The software is currently available for Mac OS X & Windows XP/2k, with Linux versions coming soon. Sounds cool!
via: [ Opensource Weblog ]
- Skype vs. Gizmo UI? Hah! No comparison
- Is Gizmo Project a Skype Killer?
- Project Gizmo challenges Skype
Update 1: It looks like opensource weblog mentioned that Gizmo is open source, and that is not true, Gizmo is just a free appliaction that uses an open standard for VoIP, and not open source application, Thanks Alaa for the comment.
posted by Abdelhalim at 5:10 PM
4 Comments:
gizmo is not open source
I just looked to their site again, it looks like they depends on an open standard for VoIP, but they are not open source, at least not until now.
you can read the same comment as yours on Open Source weblog
http://opensource.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000697050949/#comments
Alaa, Thanks for the comment
Copy of the comment on Opensource weblog by Mark:
The company Sipphone.com is behind Gizmo, and does not have a great history when it comes to reliability or customer-service. They are, however, very good at generating hype.
Also, Gizmo is not open source. The SIP protocol is an open standard (just like FTP or HTTP is), and Gizmo uses this protocol (just like internet explorer uses the HTTP open standard), but the source code for Gizmo is proprietary from all indications, and thus will suffer from the same weaknesses of other closed-source software.
I'd recommend finding truly open-source SIP phone software, and supporting its development instead of wasting time with Gizmo, where you cannot fix it if it breaks since you don't have the source code to work with.
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