People love Skype, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) program, but Linux users have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, Skype will run on some versions of Linux, but it doesn’t run on all of them and the Linux versions, 2.1-beta, lags far behind the Windows version.

Still, Linux users really want Skype so every now and again another story starts that Skype is going to go open-source. In the latest Skype open-source rumor, it’s claimed that “We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community.”

The basis for this? Some correspondence between Skype technical support and a Mandriva Linux user-Skype supports generally older versions of Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. In it, the French-speaking Skype tech. support tech said that it’s possible that the final version of Skype for Linux will be open source.

That wasn’t much, but it did hint that it might be possible that Skype was going to at least make its Linux client open-source. I decided it was worth my time to look farther.

So, I gave Skype a call in Luxembourg. A Skype public relations spokesperson quickly replied: “We appreciate our user community’s enthusiasm and realize this is something they have been wanting for a while. We realize the potential of the open source community and believe that making Skype for Linux an open source application will help to speed up its development and enhance its compatibility with different versions of Linux. While it is our goal to make Skype for Linux source code available to the community in the near future, we are not at a point to disclose an exact release date yet.”

More >