Re: You are missing the point

["Erick Woods" <erick gnomepro com>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Unfortunately, you couched it in terms of Gnomemeeting, and everyone's
noted
> that your point of view was outside the goals of that project in
particular.

She did, but I think it's pretty clear now that she did that without the
understanding that "video conferencing" and "video chatting" are different
things.  I don't think the average user should be expected to understand
that.  GnomeMeeting is also named and looks much like Microsoft's
NetMeeting - which, prior to MSN chat, facilitated a lot of point-to-point
video/chat comunications.  I think GnomeMeeting far exceeds NetMeeting, but
she made the mistake that most people who are unfamiliar with the
differences would make.

> There is nothing stopping us from connecting up the dots between IM
clients
> and Gnomemeeting to provide a standards-based 'click and go' video/voice
> chat connection.

That would be great!  :-)

> Saying that we should 'absolutely' support proprietary protocols is not
> wildly compatible with what GNOME is trying to achieve. If we can
> interoperate with proprietary protocols, that's fine, but if we can use
and

Interoperability is essential for the success of any application of this
nature.  How many of our friends and family are GNOME users?  We might wish
more were and work to that end, but it is not the case that they all are.
Open source/free software has gained it's success in large part because of
the interoperability it provides with proprietary solutions - consider
samba, rdesktop and others.

> support standards, that's far better. You can argue this on the "what
users

Standards are better, but they are not always a complete solution.

> Dude. Gnomemeeting, or another h323 client, or a standard PSTN phone, or a
> 'hardware' IP phone. Because we use standards, these are all possible.
It's
> not weird stuff.

I think the intent and differentiation between "video conferencing" and
"video chatting" has been established.  :-)

Erick Woods