Toxcore development boost on Indiegogo

[ghostpatch]

the crowdfunding campaign is to raise enough money for one month of fulltime development to get some stuff done.

to make it short, Tox is an open source, peer to peer alternative to Skype. It has a stong focus on privacy and encryption and features group chats, voice and videochats and even filesharing hihihii : )

You "can" already use it but its still in development. Regardless, I'm very excited and hope the month of coding will help to speed up development...

Link:   https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/toxcore-development#/story

 

[Haraldur]

What does this do that Ekiga does not?

(I use neither Egiga nor Skype, but I believe Ekiga is the prime FOSS competitor).

 

[levi]

His github page might have an answer to that: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore#why-are-you-doing-this-there-are-already-a-bunch-of-free-skype-alternatives

 

[ElPoco]

What makes Skype special isn't that it does voice/video chat. It's that it just works.

The SIP protocol should theoretically let you easily do everything that Skype does, but most SIP clients require you to register a SIP account (without giving you the option to create one) and struggle with NAT forwarding. 

Last time I've tried, I was unable to get a SIP-phone software that I could just install and use to get a video chat over the internet between two home PCs with pretty standard networks.

On the other hand, you can get Skype working even behind a swarm of routers and firewalls in a strange corporate network where getting any kind of internet trafic through is extremely hard and requires adding many rules here and there. That's what make Skype so impressive. That's also part of what makes it scary.

 

[ghostpatch]

@Haraldur

I would think that Mumble is the leading voip Skype competitor. Yeah no video but a lot of people (including me) do not like video chats.

had to google Ekiga. After a quick look over their feature list, I couldn't find anything about encryption or enforcement of privacy (except proxy support - lame). Did I overlook something? It seems they use centralised servers, no peer to peer connections like Tox does. Tox aims for privat, secure, decentralised, "easy to use" (well, not there yet) communication. It also supports more platforms like BSD, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Pidgin plugin, etc..

The terminal based Toxic client is also very nice. In my opinion you need at least one terminal based and one graphical client for software like this.

 

[levi]

In my opinion, video chat is the raison d'etre of skype - I guess it does offer audio only calls too, but if something doesn't offer video chat, it's not a skype competitor.