Finding an open source alternative to Skype has been on my todo list for a while.
Any recommendations?
The open-source protocol XMPP (Google Talk's protocol) has videoconferencing support. I think it has two extensions for that (the X stands for eXtendable, so the use of an extension to the protocol is perfectly normal and desirable): one is old pretty bad from what I understand, the newer one is developed by Google (open-source) and should work just as well as using Skype.