Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Interest for GM 2.00

[Rick Marshall <rjm zenucom com>]

hi damien,

a few (hopefully helpful) comments after watching this for a day:

1. great product. well done.
2. i get the same doubts about my database system when i look out at 
mysql, oracle, etc. then i go back to my product and think - yep, that's 
why i did it. i'm sure you'll think the same.
3. current products - we use tandberg video conference and ericsson ip 
phones as well. nothing wrong with gm. skype? as dodgy as anything else. 
inside australia it all works well. to/from china - marginal for everything.

future directions:

option a:

a server to reflect calls properly. that's part of the strength of 
skype, netmeeting etc. can we do a reflected h323 service? would the 
bandwidth requirements kill it? (the other strength of skype is the 
access to local calls world wide for a low rate...)

option b:

a 'packaged' voip and conferencing solution. ie a super project that 
incorporates gm, asterix, etc so that we can create corporate phone and 
conferencing facilities quickly and easily. and yes it could be a paid 
service/product.

just my 5c worth.

rick

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?
>  
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