GNU Ring 1.0 released
Disclaimer: ex Skype employee.<p>Looks like a Skype clone from 10 years ago to me.
I cannot see this working in the long run. Many people naively think that Skype switched from full p2p to partially p2p to server centric because of some evil plot designed by Microsoft. This is all wrong. Skype abandonned full peer to peer because it does not work if you want something fast, reliable, and feature rich.<p>1. Asking users to enable upnp is a joke. I would never do that, and anyone doing so should consider the security implications of doing so. Unfortunately, since they want to stay pure p2p they have no other possibility to solve the "both clients behind a NAT router" problem. This is why Skype relies on STUN like protocols => not possible in pure p2p.<p>2. Peer discovery in pure p2p is SLOW. Skype understood that and switched to hosted "supernodes" with their IPs hard-coded in the client. It's the only way to have reliable peers to introduce you to the network.<p>3. You WANT dedicated peers with good connection and 100% uptime.<p>4. You cannot efficiently have shared states in pure p2p without an identity server. That would require the clients to bring their keys with them on every device, not very practical.<p>5. In case the network collapses, there is no way for it to go up again without supernodes.