Or, maybe this will cause users to take Jabber/XMPP more seriously and stop using proprietary technology for corporate IM.
I've worked at places where management is completely gaga over Skype and would push me to support it despite the fact that I had no ability to block spam, troubleshoot messaging problems or integrate our IM system into existing Asterisk, SSO, monitoring and collaboration solutions.
IMHO, Openfire is far more flexible, extensible, secure, reliable and most importantly - manageable as a service.
When an XMPP solution that's as easy to use as Skype comes out I'll be all for this. As it stands, even Google's video chat is much more difficult for end-users to install and use.
I used to use Ekiga for video chat and it was much shoddier than Skype, constantly dropping calls, refusing to release the audio or video device so that we couldn't call back, and other serious bugs. Skype "just works".
I really hope that someone comes up with a decent free software competitor, but it doesn't really exist at this point. The fastest way to solve this problem would be for Skype to become free software.
I've worked at places where management is completely gaga over Skype and would push me to support it despite the fact that I had no ability to block spam, troubleshoot messaging problems or integrate our IM system into existing Asterisk, SSO, monitoring and collaboration solutions.
IMHO, Openfire is far more flexible, extensible, secure, reliable and most importantly - manageable as a service.
http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
disclaimer: I do not work for Ignite and have no vested interest in their business.