Am Mittwoch, 30. November 2005 13:30 schrieb 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... > [...] > 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. I have no Yahoo nor MSN account, and I will never have one. Although I have an ICQ account, I think of it as "Legacy" - most of my friends only have ICQ, some have Jabber, but none of my friends use one of the above mentioned. Second, the protocol is not open, and can be changed any time, so there is no guarantee they wont break the protocol just when I really need it. So these are no option for me. > 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. They are not here yet. On the other hand, wengo may be useful as an PC-to-Phone provider. And remember, some people just like the freedom of choice - Gnome and KDE happily coexist, both are "full featured desktop environments", but some prefer Gnome, some prefer KDE. > 3) Another part of users just want something that works and will use > Skype despite the risks that are involved. As soon as Skype becomes open source or the protocol becomes an open standard, I may reconsider it as an alternative ... > 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. More and more companies recognize open standards as an important value - not critical yet, but important. If there are two technically and feature wise equivalent solutions, but one adheres to open standards, but the other does not, which one will be taken? > 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. I think the feature GM has lacked most in the past was the possibility to find a working solution to talk with persons on other operating systems. I don't know any good working h323 softphone for OS X, and to many tried using NetMeeting on Windows, stubled and fell. With SIP, there are a lots of working solutions for every operating system, so it becomes easy to "just call" any of your friends. And GM is IMHO the best existing softphone for Linux, and thanks to Julien will be for Windows, so after having found a working solution, many will be searching for a "better" one. > 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? Move your as! ;-) Greetings, Lurchi -- Stefan Brüns / Kastanienweg 6 - Zimmer 1206 / 52074 Aachen mailto:lurch gmx li http://www.kawo1.rwth-aachen.de/~lurchi/ phone: +49 241 169-4206 mobile: +49 160 3797725 -- Stefan Brüns / Kastanienweg 6 - Zimmer 1206 / 52074 Aachen mailto:lurch gmx li http://www.kawo1.rwth-aachen.de/~lurchi/ phone: +49 241 169-4206 mobile: +49 160 3797725
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