thoughts on the end of Speak Freely

I'm quite dismayed to see the announcement of Speak Freely's demise.  It
seemed to me that Speak Freely was enjoying more popularity than it had in
years.  That's why so many people were trying to fight with their NAT
boxes and get it working.  Others were talking about all sorts of creative
uses for it, and the web forum seemed to increase awareness of this
program.  As far as I know, it is the only program that exists which can
truly allow voice chats between windows and Unix users.  I believe that
there was once one called Cu Cme (see you, see me) which was both voice
and video, but it has long been discontinued.  In fact, other than
Microsoft products like Net Meeting and AOL's voice function in their
Instant Messenger client, most voice/video conferencing programs have
fallen by the wayside.  Speak Freely was a survivor and a fighter.  In my
opinion, no other voice program has anywhere as good audio quality.
Speak Freely is quite popular in the visually-impaired community, and
since it is the only voice chat client to function in Linux at the
command-line, it is especially popular with blind Linux users.  The users
of the Speakup screen reader package have built a custom version of Speak
Freely optimized for their reflector server.  It has the capability of
listing who's on the server, and has a feature that many have wanted for
years.  It blends audio very smoothly.  That is, if two people talk at
once, you hear both of them instead of the rapid back-and-forth clicking
of voices.  I did notice that this adds a little noise to the audio, so I
use the standard version for one-on-one conversations.  Also, it's based
on version 7.3, so the newer features are absent.  Yet, it's just a shame
to see something that looked like it was rising from the ashes to be
killed again.  I know that Mr. Walker has had a lot of frustrations with
his program over the years, and there seems to be a new trend to point out
every little bug in it without offering to help fix it, so I can
understand where he's coming from.  I just wish I could program better.
There are so many Linux/Unix open-source projects out their just waiting
for the person with talent and time to improve them.  Well, no matter
what, I will always consider Speak Freely to be the best, most
feature-filled free Internet telephony program ever and will continue to
use it as long as it is feasible.



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