Gaim Forks To Get Voice And Video Support

RAMMS+EIN writes "Everyone's favorite instant messenger, Gaim, has recently been forked. The new gaim-vv project aims to provide voice and video chat support, which will eventually be backported into the main branch." Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Comments

Too many choices

[bonch]

Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

Re:Too many choices

[sglane81]

Competition drives innovation.

Re:Too many choices

[sirsnork]

The way I see this fork is basically like an unstable branch of the linux kernel. This way they can just work on the video and voice without messing up gaims normal development and without having to work out why something has broken because someone else applied a patch for something unrelated that breaks it. This way the only patches applied with be fore video and voice, and once thats working properly they can drop it into the current devel branch and make it work

Re:Too many choices

[MikeFM]

There is nothing wrong with H.323. It's just that the IM companies like to use their own protocols so they can lock users in. I'd like to see support for all of those protocols and H.323.

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

What gaim-vv aims to provide is voice and video chat with AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, etc, that is, the protocols that people actually _use_.

Those are also the protocols that are under the control of companies with their own financial interests. How long do you think those companies are going to provide access to open source clients when those services don't fit into their business plan and stop looking like attractive business propositions anymore?

GnomeMeeting and H.323 are easy to use. They talk to existing video conferencing hardware, give you full control over how you connect and what directory services you use, and easily run even serverless. If you use AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, or any of the others, it's just stupid.

At the very least, let's hope that GAIM-vv will provide full access to standards-based H.323 video conferencing, in addition to its support for proprietary services. But it really should pop up a big warning dialog every time anybody uses AIM, MSN, or Yahoo!: "This service may be discontinued or become unavailable without warning any day. [OK?]".

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

The situation is similar, and it's a reason to avoid closed-source software, but it's not quite the same. Most closed-source software keeps running even if is discontinued. So, you can keep running WordPerfect on DOS for years if you like, until the hardware breaks or you get tired of it. With a proprietary service, things can stop working without warning from one day to the next.

Re:Too many choices

[Joe Tie.]

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

What your sig gets wrong though is that there is no generic lump of 'people'. I'm a person, and I do want an endless amount of choices. It's one of the reasons I use Linux. Now if your sig read 'the average computer user considering using Linux dosn't want an endless amount of choices', then I'd agree. And I'd also not really care what they want. We've got a high enough user base to get the occasional port of games, and 3D drivers - that's more than enough for what I want. Past that, why should I care about more people using the same operating system as me than I'd care about people using the same brand of sock? Especially if to get them to wear that sock, it'd have to be shrunk to a level uncomfortable for my foot.

good thing

[jangell]

The way I look at it, this could be a very good thing.. From what I've witnessed currently the gaim development team is busy with many things, and cannot focus on one or two certain features.

Now that It has forked off the developers that are interested in this will have the time to do the one thing they WANT to do, not a bunch of others.

The way I look at it, it is kind of like the introduction of the assembly line, a group will be very skilled at one task and not be working on and assembleing all the other features.

Quite frankly, This is one feature gaim is really lacking. With the introduction of broadband services in the home, video and voice is extremely popular.

It's hard to get someone to try linux when their main tasks cannot be performed.

This is a very good thing.

GAIM UI

[BESTouff]

That's nice, I hope they'll take GnomeMeeting's UI as an example. Gaim'UI sucks big time : it has tons of windows opening for no reason, taking the focus (and the keyboard input) from what you were previously doing. Way too much intrusive if you ask me.

Re:I wish...

[scmason]

Are you missing the entire point of post? It is open source, you don't have to wrestle control from anyone. Just take it, fix it and use it. If your changes are useful, they will make it back into the product, or you can start your own fork.

Duh. ..

another fork?

[master0ne]

and this makes how many forks of gaim now? lets see we have gaim, ayttm, everybuddy, and gaim-vv, are there any im missing? sounds like a poll to me... "whats your favorite linux messanger client? aim, yahoo, ayttm, everybuddy, gaim, gaim-vv, cowboy neal's all-in-one messanger. ytalk, or i dont chat you insensitive clod!"

anyway in all seriousness ayttm (are you talking to me) look it up on freshmeat (as im too lazy/tired to link it) already has rudimentry yahoo webcam support, however it is still lacking, i loved trillian for windows, and would like to see gaim go in that direction, with all the eyecandy and skins and plugins... i know, ill learn c and fork gaim myself!!

Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exciting news indeed.

Gaim is the only decent AIM client for I've run across for Windows - the official client is utter crap, and Trillian is bloated payware. Still, some of my less-technically-inclined friends refuse to use Gaim, citing the fact that it doesn't have enough cool features and "bling bling". With cool new features like these, I have more ammunition in my battle to get people to switch ;p

Now, if only the Gaim folks would get their act together on MSN support ...

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[opello]

'chances are' ? not quite ... at least for me using latest 'stable'

i'd like to see support for msn pics, like amsn
i don't keep up with the drama that is gaim so i don't know if they are planning on implimenting it or not

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mkamp]

If you want a closed group like for team communication, why don't you go for jabber? You could setup your own server in seconds (at least with debian: apt-get install jabber), have your own rooms and don't have to bother too much about the internet and firewalls.

It is truly open source. That includes the protocol, most client-apis, most clients and most servers.
Furthermore the core is already in IETF RFCs.

No need to worry about vendors checking the protocols anymore and a wide variety of clients to use.

Watch out, your favorite IDE might even get a plug-in for IMing.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[hak1du]

Also, I have lots of x86 using friends that hate booting into Windows from Linux just to use advertising-ridden AIM.

The ads are part of their business model. If lots of people switch to using open, ad-free clients, they'll eventually just decide to keep those clients from connecting. That's the trouble with using software that relies on proprietary protocols and proprietary servers.

I know it's less convenient, but try to get your friends to use chatting (in particular, video chatting) using open protocols. There are technically perfectly good choices: H.323, Jabber, etc. People just have to use them more. And the longer AIM becomes entrenched, the harder it will get to change.

Just imaging what E-mail would be like if it had started like chatting--with AOL, Microsoft, and a few others controling the servers and the infrastructure. Ultimately, ISPs should provide IM servers just like they provide mail servers.

Reverse-engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you tell us how you intend to reverse engineer the proprietary protocols and patented codecs used by ICQ, and MSN these days for example?

I see you are basing your work on linphone, for SIP support, but do you know that recent versions of MSN do not use SIP anymore?

If you plan to create something that will work from gaim to gaim only, then why not cooperate with the GnomeMeeting developers instead of trying to compete with them? Shouldn't Open Source be based on collaboration instead of competition?

In fact....

[Kjella]

Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

...I'd call it an extremely rare occurance. You have the "nothing is ever perfect"-camp which are at 0.x permanently, and the "ship now, fix later" which definately don't qualify at 1.0. Only projects with a reasonable balance of both kinds seem to hit 1.0 well, OSS or commercial...

Kjella

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Queuetue]

In general, the #gaim regulars are a bunch of jackasses. The latest stable, .76 has an annoying bug where if notifies you and asks for a response in the event that it needs to reconnect. This in turn raises problems with metacity, which gives focus to any new window, and now reconnection, instead of being something that happens magically behind the scenes by magic, is a 20-second clickfest of annoyance popups, randomly interrupting work.

Mentioning this topic (or any other user-centric topic) in #gaim will get you kicked pretty quickly .

I say the more forks (although this does not appear to be a fork) the better - there are several user-centric forks of GAIM, and hopefully one of them will stick.