Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Interest for GM 2.00

[Timothée Lecomte <timothee lecomte ens fr>]

Damien Sandras wrote:

>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...
>  
>
It's a very good step to have doubts about a project ! It makes you
progress !

>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.
>  
>
I want *video* chat (not simply audio because, in my case, mobile phones
providers in France offer unlimited calls in standard subscriptions...).
I want it to perform well, reliably. Finally I want it to be open-source
so that I don't have to fear possible arbitrary change on a proprietary
protocol. That's why I have used Gnomemeeting since the last year.

If it could be cross-platform, it would be wondeful, as there are no
consistent solution for cross-platform videoconferencing as for today. I
am really waiting for Gnomemeeting to appear under Windows...


>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.
>  
>
Audio only : I don't think it was your objective when you first worked
on GM... Why changing it ?

>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.
>  
>
There can be alternatives, but in the *video* field, GM is (for me) and
can stay the leader !

>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?
>  
>
Whatever you decide, thank you very much for your time on this project !

Yours sincerely,

Timothée Lecomte