Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Interest for GM 2.00

[Tamas K Papp <tpapp Princeton EDU>]

Damien,

I am using Linux on a PPC machine.  While there are many VOIP
applications (and I have no doubt that there are many more to come),
almost all of them are closed source and binary only.  This means that
they are usually provided for Windows, OS X, and linux-i386.  

Nobody even considers linux on other processors, and gnomemeeting is
the only solution to have VOIP on my machine.

Thank you for working on it, and if your time permits, please continue
to do so.

Tamas


On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 01:30:40PM +0100, 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...
> 
> 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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-- 
Bayesian statistics is difficult in the sense that thinking is difficult.
--Donald A. Berry, American Statistician 51:242 (1997)