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 _______________________________________________ GnomeMeeting-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnomemeeting-list
