Skype Devices

Skype (IPA pronunciation: /skʌɪp/, rhymes with type) is a peer-to-peer Voice over IP (VoIP) network founded by the entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, also founders of the file sharing application Kazaa. more...

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It competes against existing open VoIP protocols such as SIP, IAX, and H.323. The Skype Group, acquired by eBay in October 2005, is headquartered in Luxembourg, with offices in London, Tallinn and Prague.

Skype has experienced rapid growth in both popular usage and software development since launch, both of its free and its paid services. The Skype communications system is notable for its broad range of features, including free voice and video conferencing, and its ability to use peer to peer (decentralized) technology to overcome common firewall and NAT (Network address translation) problems.

System and software

Technology

The main difference between Skype and other VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model, rather than the more traditional server-client model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralised and distributed among the nodes in the network, which means the network can scale very easily to large sizes (currently just over 100 million users) without a complex and costly centralised infrastructure.

Skype also routes calls through other Skype peers on the network to ease the traversal of Symmetric NATs and firewalls. This, however, puts an extra burden on those who connect to the Internet without NAT, as their computers and network bandwidth may be used to route the calls of other users.

The Skype client's application programming interface (API) opens the network to software developers. The Skype API allows other programs to use the Skype network to get "white pages" information and manage calls.

The Skype code is closed source, and the protocol is not standardized. The Windows user interface was developed in Pascal using Delphi, the Linux version is written in C++ with Qt, and the Mac OS X version is written in Objective-C with Cocoa. Parts of the client use Internet Direct (Indy), an open source socket communication library.

Security

Critics point out that secure communication is not a feature:

Skype reportedly uses openly available, strong encryption algorithms.; The user is not involved in the encryption process and therefore does not have to deal with the issues of Public key infrastructure.;

General

The Skype code is proprietary and closed source, and will not become Open-source software, according to a quotation:

Read more at Wikipedia.org