Gizmo appears to be a another SIP client. A soft phone that uses the SIP protocols to talk to… well it appears to be hard wired to one VOIP vendor’s SIP proxy. That would be SipPhone. SipPhone peers with FreeWorldDialup, so I could reach my basement asterisk server thru that. At that point I’m back in the open VOIP world.

I can see the hard wired sip proxy and tun server in the object library. I guess, I could use DNS spooffing to point it directly at my asterisk server.

Michael Robertson, SipPhone’s owner, when accouncing it wrote: “This week, a product called Gizmo is being unveiled – the first viable Skype alternative built on open source that pledges to connect to all.” Which translates as “We used open source and we are standards based (pretty much).” and it doesn’t mean “We are giving back everything we wrote to the commons.”

He has a classic column fodder product comparison table in his posting. Make’s Skype look pretty bad. Needs a few more rows, for things like encryption, what codex are supported/required, how many adopters, and how much of VOIP traffic flows thru an middleman. Needs a few more columns for other vendor’s offerings

None the less, this is a provocative offering. It certainly is much more spritely than the X-Lite softphone/SIP-client. X-Lite, on the otherhand, can register with a dozen or more VOIP vendors. Hard to displace Skype at this point. But it is not impossible. More open would help.

Update: My experiance so far has been spotty. Sometimes it works great. Other times it behaves like Alpha quality software with lots of rough edges, intermittent connections, and occational crashes. The Gizmo discussion forums are an excellent resource and the postings there are similar to my experiance. Hopefully over the next month they will work out a lot of the rough edges. One nice thing, it will allow you to call sip URL’s, though I don’t seem to be able to enter them in the address book. If it was open source all these rough edges would be attracting contributors :-).