[GnomeMeeting-devel-list] Re: Gnomemeeting-devel-list Digest, Vol 19, Issue 52

[Philippe Lefevre <ph l libertysurf fr>]

Hello all,

I'm not a guru in the subject but I can see that VoIp and SIP 
technologies are really new for a lot of people and even companies 
(probably small and medium companies... I'm working in a bank and a VoIp 
solution has only been installed this year !)
So I feel that you should let the time to potential users to discover GM 
2.0 (thank you to all of you �SIP Wizards) and all those new features. 
I think the w32 version will certainly help in this way (thank you 
Julien again).
The main for now is probably to have a robust GM2 release and to make it 
known. After that, you'd be able to consider what you have to do. I 
believe this is very untimely to predict what GM will be next year with 
this new version.

PS : May be, could you try to explain more in details (on the GM site 
for example) what are the advantages and differences between the 
classicals messengers or skype or others, what you can do with GM but 
not with others, etc...
It would help the final users to make the best choice.

Best regards,
PhL


gnomemeeting-devel-list-request gnome org a �it :

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:30:40 +0100
> From: Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>
> Subject: [GnomeMeeting-devel-list] Interest for GM 2.00
> To: gnomemeeting-devel-list gnome org, gnomemeeting-list gnome org
> Message-ID: <1133353840 15284 23 camel golgoth01>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> Hello to all,
>
>
> I have some doubts about the future of the project. I know that it is a
> recurrent subject with me since I started it back in 2000...
>
> GnomeMeeting was the first "easy-to-use" multi-platform softphone. I
> insist on the "multi-platform" aspect, as the code is portable.
> (However, nobody is maintaining the MacOSX port, nobody is maintaining
> the FreeBSD port, and we have to do the WIN32 port ourselves (thanks
> Julien)).
>
> Today, we see the emergence of VoIP with SIP support. We received many
> requests to add SIP, and last year, I started working on that. The
> project is nearly ready and 2.00 is not too far from a release.
>
> However, few people are using Asterisk, or a corporate IPBX supporting
> SIP AND a softphone running on GNU/Linux. So I think few people really
> need SIP.
>
> That means that GnomeMeeting has a small "market share" (the GNU/Linux
> Desktop users) and that "market share" is even smaller if we think to
> the market share represented by the fraction of those users who want a
> softphone. Things would be so different on WIN32...
>
> There are today 4 categories of users :
>
> 1) A majority of users want simple audio/video chat. Kopete recently
> started allowing this with Yahoo and MSN, and GAIM is on the road to
> offer it too. Projects like Telepathy/Farsight will offer a
> GStreamer-based alternative to GAIM and Kopete.
>
> 2) Another big part of the users want a Skype-like software supporting
> SIP. Some big companies, with loads of money, are developing full-time
> on such solutions, like Wengo, or Gizmo, or even others.
>
> 3) Another part of users just want something that works and will use
> Skype despite the risks that are involved.
>
> 4) Finally, on the corporate side, where there are less users at least
> on GNU/Linux, you have big companies offering solutions like XTEN,
> developed full-time by talented developers, even though being
> proprietary. But corportate users often do not care about the Open
> Source aspect of things, and big corporations are already offering their
> own softphone working with their IPBX.
>
> GnomeMeeting is playing in those 4 fields, but there are now so many
> alternatives, that I wonder if there is still an interest to develop
> GnomeMeeting after 2.00 will have been released. Two years ago, you had
> to use GnomeMeeting if you wanted to do 1), 2), or 4). Currently, there
> are so many alternatives that GnomeMeeting is perhaps unuseful.
>
> So you, GnomeMeeting users, what do you think of that?
>
> Should I start another project and develop slowly on GnomeMeeting, or
> should I continue full-speed?
>