Skype’s taken off bigtime in terms of popularity, and I’ve been considering switching over to it and ditching my cell and land line phones. Skype has one huge problem though, which is that it’s based on proprietary, closed source systems. If they become the predominant Voip provider we will have effectively switched from one proprietary vendor (the existing phone companies) to another, and we’ll confront the same sorts of issues with pricing and features that we have now. Enter Gizmo, which is based on the SIP standard that providers like Vonage use. Gizmo works on Macs and Win32 out of the box, with a linux version on the way. It’s free to download and comes with voicemail that Skype charges for, as well as conferencing and recording features. The downsides are that it’s still a little flaky, their callin (where you get a local number folks with regular phones can use to call you) service has fairly limited coverage right now, and most importantly it lacks the broad installed base that skype already has. In an effort to fix that, I encourage you to go download a copy. You might also find this piece which compares skype to gizmo and goes into more detail as to why we don’t want a repeat of history with the phone monopolies. My account name is the oh-so appropriate ‘davidhamilton,’ which leads to another observation – it pays to register these kinds of services quick so you can reserve your chosen identity.