Regarding Skype, you're not going to get Skype users over to a free alternative by making your own voice-chat program; you need to actually reverse-engineer the

Regarding Skype, you're not going to get Skype users over to a free alternative by making your own voice-chat program; you need to actually reverse-engineer the protocol and make your own client so they can switch without having to convince other people. (Of course, someone did reverse engineer Skype however-long-ago-it-was-now, but looking it up, apparently it might have been done by decompilation and so of questionable legality, which is why nobody's making a Pidgin plugin to use it. Annoying.)