I’m doing some international traveling at the moment. Wanting to stay in touch with loved ones has me contemplating Thoughts on Free Communication once again. It seems that all the pieces are there … I wish I had the headroom to set something up.
An alternative I hadn’t considered is Mumble+Murmur. An old post from Keshav Khera has turned me onto the idea that gamers might inadvertently lead the way toward decentralized and self-controlled realtime communication, and Mumble+Murmur seems to hold some promise in that area. AFAIK, it doesn’t support video and the Android clients don’t seem so very awesome, but at least one of them is FOSS. Something to look more deeply into.