I saw this post, dated May 16, 2004 by terminus, a skype staff member, which made me very happy. I am sick of running windows on my laptop only to use for skye. Now I can stay in good old Penguin-land.

 Skype is now starting a closed Linux beta. We are looking for forum
 members who would be willing to actively test the Linux version and
 provide input and feedback to finalize the Linux version development.

link

story

 So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?

 Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future?
 What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry -
 it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or
 make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location?
 Nobody does that.

 With digital you can do things better; for a really simple straight forward
 things.

 No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband
 and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.

 So who, then? We've seen that even with the best intentions Wintel can't do
 a good job. It has to come from the consumer electronics people;

 ...

 What would you do differently, if you had your time as CEO again?

 We wouldn't have spent time on user interfaces. We'd have left that
 much earlier. [In 2001, Symbian left the business of designing UIs to its
 licensees, with the exception of UIQ, which remains part of the company].
 Everyone was keen to share and we tried hard for two years, but it was never
 going to happen. Everything about those companies [phone OEMs] is based
 in their own UIs. So that was two years wasted.

 In hindsight we came to the right view; but we never learnt that lesson.
 There were other things people were keen for us to get into early, for
 example WAP. We could never have NOT done it, but I had a pretty good
 feeling it wasn't going to be worth it. But I wasn't the customers.®
 So it has to go back to being vertically integrated; you have to tackle
 the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically
 because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through,
 starting with a niche.

Skype is a good VoIP program, that also does conference calls amongst several people reasonably well. It helps me cut down my phone bill :-). skype