Google open sourcing voice and video engine for the web

Is this Google's response to MS purchasing skype? Seems like the classic strategy of commoditizing your competitor's business (and they get a 2-for-1 deal since Apple is also wielding FaceTime).

Apple, where is the Facetime open spec that you promised? Google may just beat them to the punch.

Does anyone have any ideas what the timeline for browser support is likely to be?<p>The website currently says they've been <i>working closely with Mozilla</i> and <i>we expect to see WebRTC support in Firefox and Chrome soon!</i>.

Finally we know what's going with iLBC codec. For more than a year it's been in a limbo.

Very nice, thank you Google.<p>Glancing over the API docs, I'm not clear what will be used for signaling. It appears to be based on XMPP/Jingle, am I right?<p>What about SIP?

How do iLBC and iSAC compare to the (also open source) Celt, Silk and Opus (Silk+Celt) codecs?

What does this mean to existing SIP/Jingle based systems? Are they now deprecated, or is there some kind of interoperability planned?

One way to decimate adversaries is to open-source your entire competitive advantage. Unfortunately that only works when you’re the market leader.<p>So nobody cares about open-sourcing WebRTC. Something that would be actually noticeable in this field right now would be Microsoft that open-sources Skype and gives everything away under the BSD license.

If Pidgin (the cross platform IM framework that Adium/others use) doesn't get this, I'll be sad/grumpy.

Not long until I'll be able to video chat on my Android via Google Talk, woo!

So is this another segment of HTML5 block or a completely novel idea?<p>It looks like a &#60;device&#62; element with streaming but they don't mention it at all.

Good work, Microsoft!<p>Embrace and extend.