[GnomeMeeting-list] Interest for GM 2.00

[Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>]

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