Comment 53 for bug 198453

Please forgive me being very blunt about this, but the last thing I need right now is for open source ideologues to tell me what I need. If I wanted that I would be using Debian.

What I need is this:
In three weeks time I shall be living on a different continent to my children. I need to communicate with them via both audio and video. I need to communicate with other people as well.

I might be able to do a lot of this using Ekiga and iChat, but I don't know this for sure and I certainly won't be around to troubleshoot any problems on a mac on another continent, which may or may not be purchased before I leave. I need something that is known to work. Skype, for all its technical and political limitations, works—except for the pulseaudio problem of course. In addition to this, a lot of my friends use Skype. They don't use SIP-based software.

The OSS version of Skype is, as far as I understand it, an old one without video support. I need video so that two young children won't forget what their dad looks like.

I bought a laptop, deleted windows and installed hardy. I did this because I was confident that hardy would be usable for day-to-day stuff. Please don't drive people like me away.

Skype has problems; it's implementation of alsa is lousy. Flash has even more (it crashes all the time). That's a fact of life. Without a doubt the quality of such software would improve radically if is were open-sourced, but that isn't going to happen. Free software developers may believe that what they are doing is very important (and they are often right), but we can't expect commercial software companies to see things the same way just because we tell them they should. That such companies now see fit to support Linux at all is a major achievement for those who have made gnu/linux what it is today.

Skype is a very important piece of software for a lot of people. Please just do whatever hacks you have to do to get it working. If that involves dmix, then so be it.