Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Re: GnomeMeeting-list Digest, Vol 19, Issue 23

[Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>]

Le mercredi 30 novembre 2005 à 21:35 -0500, Ariel Pablo Topasso a
écrit :
> Hi Damien,
> 
>    My view is that GM is a great project, and with release 2 it will
> approach maturity. With SIP-based audio and video, STUN and (maybe one
> day) ICE/TURN support, and a Win32 release, it will become the
> de-facto standard tool for voice & video over IP. I am not sure if
> SIMPLE & Jabber will be there too but they would be a welcome
> addition. I am sure this will fuel the creation of
> community-sponsored, federated  SIP Proxies out there. Add to that the
> (in my opinion) unstoppable evolution of the average-user desktop
> towards Linux and you find that gnomemeeting is here to stay.
> 
>     It will be sometime though until we can fully get away from the
> big commercial IM networks, replaced by an open SIP-based network.
> Until then most of us (again, in my view) will have to use two
> clients, or, wouldn't it be great for the user community to develop a
> GnomeMeeting API of sorts so that the GAIM/Kopete folks could
> integrate GM SIP&H.323 voice and video functionalities?


Julien has been working on that (DBUS component), however, gaim people
are less than interested. Sean Egan, the developer of GAIM, has been
hired by GOOGLE to work full-time on adding voice/video support to GAIM.
That can explain why they are not interested.

> 
> Thanks a lot and keep up with the good work!
> Ariel
> 
> 
> 
>          1. Interest for GM 2.00 (Damien Sandras)
>         
>         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?
>         --
>         _      Damien Sandras
>         (o-     GnomeMeeting: http://www.gnomemeeting.org/
>         //\     FOSDEM 2006 : http://www.fosdem.org
>         v_/_    SIP Phone   : sip:dsandras gnomemeeting net
>                               sip:600000 gnomemeeting net
>         
>         
> 
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-- 
 _      Damien Sandras
(o-     GnomeMeeting: http://www.gnomemeeting.org/
//\     FOSDEM 2006 : http://www.fosdem.org
v_/_    SIP Phone   : sip:dsandras gnomemeeting net 
                      sip:600000 gnomemeeting net