Real hackers ship. Developing a project under an open source license should never be an excuse for vaporware, but unfortunately it often is. If GNU Free Call turns out to be any good--and the bar for being better than Skype on Linux or Android is low enough to be subterranean--I'll gladly use it, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting excited at this point.
"Developing a project under an open source license should never be an excuse for vaporware"
Actually, it should. If you want to have meaningful external/community participation in a project, you need to involve the community from the earliest stages. (Sorry, I'm a bit sensitive to this complaint after working for Mozilla. Apparently some people would rather we do our planning and development in secret, rather than allow community access to our design and product discussions.)
Mozilla started off with a compelling product and provided very clearly-defined ways for the community at large to contribute to the design and implementation.
Does design by committee (or, worse, design by community) ever work? You are likely more qualified to answer this question than I am, but in my experience it seems like the only time that it can work is when the project has very strong guiding principles and a shepherd (or small number of shepherds) willing to say "your feature/idea is cool, but it doesn't fit right now".
Everybody has a different idea of what a Skype replacement should do. I want something which will run on Linux or Android and use my Google Voice for calling in. Maybe others want something which will allow them to have conversations of a religious or seditious nature in countries which don't allow that without worrying about getting caught. Others use it for phone interviews with video because the user experience is better than standard telephony. Still others just want to talk to relatives in other countries without paying a fortune.
Which ones should the project focus on first? Obviously I'm going to be passionate about my preferred use cases, but if I'm in the minority then from a traction and market share standpoint it makes sense to work on other use cases first. But I don't even see a lot of thought around this, just a wish list of high-level features.
In five years, maybe I'll be using GNU telephony all the time. Or maybe it will have failed to gain traction or the developers will have gotten bogged down trying to implement everything at once or chasing rabbits down community rabbit holes. Show me a product and I'll be excited. Show me a press release and I'll be cynical.
That was my first reaction, but it looks like these guys know what they're talking about and have a feasible plan for getting something useful made. That's a far cry from working code, but it is reason for cautious hope.
