Free (as in freedom) communications, VoIP and messaging

Microsoft's acquisition of Skype, the highly proprietary de-facto standard of consumer VoIP, and their roll-out of Lync to big business threatens to create a world of proprietary, closed VoIP systems that may actively exclude the open standards and open source paradigm. Imagine the DVD CSS or similar DRM mechanisms applied to all phone calls: would Skype remain free once such a mechanism becomes entrenched? In the ongoing revolution towards convergent technologies, the interests of genuinely free software and genuinely free communications are becoming more and more tightly intertwined with each other. This session aims to look at ways that Debian and GNU/Linux systems can bring genuine principals of freedom into the communications domain, what works now, what is missing, what actions can be taken. Introduction by Daniel Pocock (Lumicall, OpenTelecoms.org, reSIProcate projects) and then discussion.