Re: jabber.gnome.org's future

[Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd luon net>]

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 10:17 +0000, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> > > doing stuff over Google hangouts these days. It would be nice if
> > > we could make something like that work with open standards and
> > > free software. I don't think IRC is the right starting point.
> > Sure..  it's not a good fit for a free software project though since it
> > isn't free software.  In fact, I would say it clearly indicates a gap in
> > our platform that we don't have something similar.
>
> We have Muji [1], but it sucks because it sends the video/audio to each of the
> parties separately, which is why it does not scale and runs into bandwidth
> issues.

That's not really a reason why it sucks though :).. I should also note
that the goal of the prototype specifically was a low number of
participants (where sending to everyone in most cases is actually a
feature as it both allows the client to do the final presentation and
doesn't add special requirements to the xmpp servers used). And ofcourse
the protocol definition specifically suggest adding support for proxies
& mixers (it just wasn't implemented).

Lots of prototypes aren't great, especially compared to polished
products. There is no reason to call them names for that though :)


> People from Google had earlier said that they want to release the
> specifications for Hangouts [2], but that hasn't happened and we have not been
> able to find a contact inside Google to help out with that.

That would be great to see. If i ever were to get the time to continue
on Muji-like things it would most likely be come a bit more hangout like
(or rather drop the constraint of having to work in existing MUCs, which
in hindsight was probably a mistake). Direct streaming to all
participants would stay though, with the possibility to dynamically
switch to bridges/proxies to scale up further if required. 

One thing you shouldn't forget is that a video conferencing server is
very resource intensive (especially if you're mixing video streams).
Google can do this because they have a massive infrastructure, but for
most others that's likely not something that can be easily be supported
resource-wise. So even if we would have a free implementation which
scales up to a large number of participants in video conference, I doubt
it's useful for Gnome to provide generally available infrastructure for.


-- 
Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd luon net>