NX Project Announcement

[Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari nomachine com>]

Hi all,

this message was sent to LTSP, GNOME and KDE developers'
mailing lists. We invite everybody in these lists to check our
work at NoMachine:

http://www.nomachine.com

NX is a commercial product and some parts are closed source,
nevertheless all the core technology on which NX is based is
and will remain OpenSource. This includes very, very good
compression of X protocol that is the result of 3 years of hard
development (I know it was hard, as I'm one of those who did
it ;-). Beside software developed by NoMachine to handle X
sessions, we integrated in the same infrastructure seamless
access to RDP and RFB sessions through integration with
RDesktop and and VNC projects.

We would be glad to see close cooperation between LTSP,
KDE, GNOME and NoMachine. We look forward to share not
only our experiences, but even code, common architecture
and desktop integration.

Some early documents, among them an introduction to NX
design goals, can be found here:

http://www.nomachine.com/documentation.php

Sources of core components are available at:

http://www.nomachine.com/dev_sources.php

There was a small thread in XFree86 forum these days were
some technical issues about X as a remote computing platform
and NX in particular were discussed. You can find it at:

http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/000629.html

We believe NX is opening Linux to an unexploited market and
can give to X new life in the form of what it was originally
intended to be: a pervasive network computing platform.

NoMachine provides a TestDrive server where you can freely
connect and run as many KDE and GNOME sessions as you
like. We think we have done a good job. Customers and many
Linux developers that had a chance to try it were really impres-
sed by the performances, but we want to hear from the real
experts.

Download the client from here:

http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

then get a user id and passoword from:

http://www.nomachine.com/testdrive.php

At the moment the test account never expires, so you can use
it to compare performances in different network conditions.
Even if you don't care about X compression, consider that NX
includes everything is needed to make a MS Windows computer
a X terminal, so you can do with it something useful :-).

A last word about NX commercial software. As we said, all the
core components (and especially the X related components)
are OSS and released ad GPL. This means that everything the
NX client and server do, can be done by hand by a normal user
having an account on the remote server. We aim at the lazy
users :-). NoMachine intends to provide the higher level software
and the administrative tools that make possible to run thousands
of users' sessions. We aim at the same customers of Citrix
MetaFrame and SCO Tarantella. In the future, we envision a
world where any application is available to any device, from
anywhere in the world. To make this possible we needed
efficient transport and compression of X-Window. Now it is
there and everybody can use it.

It's our interest to make our technology widespread. We would
be glad to see an OpenSource version of NX client and NX
server software and would be happy to see our OSS code in
LTSP, GNOME and KDE projects. We'll provide all the help
to make this possible. At the same time we think that a 100%
OSS business model is not affordable for our company. We
would like to contribute to build a free battleground where
OSS and commercial software can cooperate (but even fairly
compete) to make OSS technology win against proprietary
solutions.

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.