Linux Room

The famous Skype which develops a highly spread peer-to-peer Internet telephony network and competes against the older existing VoIP protocols such as SIP or IAX is now into some troubles with a German court regarding one of its products.

It seems that Skype’s WSKP100 Linux-based phone, made by SMC and distributed in more places in Europe (Germany included), does not provide access to the source code for every user, even though it is licensed under the GPLv2. According to some Skype officials, the phone now comes with a flyer that gives the users an URL address to the source code. But the court in Germany still considers this insufficient and not in compliance with GPLv2.

However, some sources claim that this is only a minor breach and that it would not affect Skype’s distribution for that phone as it requires only a few changes in the distributing protocol. But there are also some voices who claim that the gpl-violations.org website is taking action against the SMC phone.

About Skype

Skype is is a peer-to-peer Internet telephony network. The Skype Group has been acquired by eBay in September 2005. As it is described on wikipedia, the main difference between Skype and VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model, rather than on the more traditional server-client model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralized and distributed among the node in the network, which means the network can scale very easily to large sizes (currently about 220 million users) without a complex and costly centralized infrastructure. Skype is also able to rout calls through other Skype peers on the network to ease the traversal of NAT and firewall. This, however, puts an extra burden on those who connect to the Internet without a NAT (network translation address), as their computers and network bandwidth may be used to route the calls of other users.