Article on Fluendo

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

Here is the first article on a series of articles focusing on GNOME
based companies.  I am having Thomas take a first look at it to correct
any errors in my interview with him back during GUADEC.  Sorry it took
so long! Whew!

Thomas if you have anything you want to add, let me know and we can add
it (eg new developments or whatever that people might like to know)  Let
me know what you think of the article.

sri

-- 
Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>

					 A New Breed of Free Desktop Companies

In the past two years, GNOME and the GTK+ project have inspired
many enterprising hackers to start companies and risk investing
capital into a market that surprisingly have shown to be robust
providing not only adequate funding for these companies but room
enough to expand operations.

I wanted to find out how successful are these companies are and
really to know if there really is a market out there for GNOME and
free software desktops in general.  I will be profiling various
companies who have shown an affiliation with the the GNOME free
desktop and it's underlying components in a series of interviews
over the next couple issues.

I had the honor of attending GUADEC 2006 at Villanova, Spain, the main
GNOME developer conference and was able to take advantage of the
fact that I would be able to meet many of the people who started
these companies in person.

Fluendo Inc
-----------

I met Thomas Vander Stichele at GUADEC, and was able to sit down
with him for a brief chat about his company Fluendo.  Thomas,  an
unassuming hacker with a relaxed air about him had plenty to say
about Fluendo which he started two years ago.  Thomas had envisioned
to start a company around the popular Gstreamer.  Gstreamer is the
common audio and video infrastructure that is in use today by the major free
software desktops KDE, GNOME and others.  The idea is to be able
to have a small core multimedia system and then be able to extend
multimedia capabilities with plugins.  Gstreamer is quickly becoming
the standard multimedia subsystem everywhere.

Fluendo started with building a business model around a streaming
server product called Flumotion.  Flumotion is a highly scalable
streaming server capable of streaming to hundreds of clients making
it an invaluble tool for those who wish to view video from remote.
The initial idea was to allow 2-3 years to let the technology mature
before releasing as a product.  In addition, Fluendo planned to do
some consultancy on Gstreamer on the side.

Thomas was candid that he didnt think the consultancy would have
gone anywhere.  Much to his surprise, the consultancy actually was
successful with successful business relationships with BBC, Nokia
and Intel amongst others.  Fluendo received a lot more success than
it anticipated.

Fluendo is currently has four different strategies.
Consultancy on Gstreamer, developing and selling codecs for
multimedia hardware, a streaming server using clustering hardware,
and finally the Eliza project, a free software DVR project similar
to Mythtv.

One of the more controversial things that Fluendo is working on is
enabling distributions to legally play music and video with legal
codecs.  Fluendo plans on talking with ISVs and Linux distributors about 
the distribution of codecs like mp3 in a legal manner in hopes that regular users would be able to play protected content if they so desired.

That said, Thomas is careful to note that he cares about the free solution.  The Xiph Foundation was created with the help and support of Fluendo to pursue a free multimedia solutions unencumbered by DRM and patents like Theora for video and RTP for VOIP.  Fluendo's streaming server works with free codecs out of the box without additional codecs.  Thomas thinks that this is what you need to do in order to enjoy community support.

For Thomas, the biggest concern is that Fluendo has a good standing with the Free and Open Source commuinity and hopes that conflicts with work on DRM and proprietary codecs will be balanced by strong advocacy for the open multimedia solution.

Today, Fluendo seems to have filled a needed gap for companies who need to stay legal and want to use proprietary codecs and are in need of a good extensible multimedia infrastructure.  Fluendo has gained the attention of big corporations like Intel and Nokia and are working with them to improve the multimedia support for Linux as well.  Fluendo is one of many linux desktop technology companies that is creating a new market and succeeding in it.