Hi Petr,

*From what I understand by the “conference call” term, it would be a speech (e.g. spoken, like over a phone) conference? My problem is that my microphone doesn’t work and I haven’t figured out why yet :-/…

Yes, it would be voice conference and you’d need a mic. I also have trouble with my mic under Kubuntu - I sometimes need to restart alsa-utils and then check the mic volume in KMix. It sometimes helps to mute/unmute the mic… Maybe one of these works for you too. I’ve installed KRecord which is quite useful to see whether the mic works or not - it has an “input level” windows that displays what signal you receive from the mic.

I don’t trust the Skype software (closed protocol and source, no data flow control, “dangerous” license etc., and from what I’ve read it does weird and undocummented things), so I prefer using open protocols and open-source solutions. If that would be a text-oriented conference, couldn’t we use some of the open protocols like Jabber conference or IRC?

Is there any software other then Skype that works on all popular platforms? Maybe Calitko will become one in the future ;-). One can hardly trust open source projects to be totally secure either… it is true though that one could never know what exactly Skype is doing. You could have a look at that pretty interesting presentation on the multiple levels of security and encryption built in Skype:
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf

Anyway, millions of people are using Skype and I don’t think there is a reason we should not use it, especially if nothing better is available.

Regards,

Peter