Over a year ago we reported on the promising gaim-vv which was supposed to bring MSN/Y! webcam and voice support to Gaim, a feature sorely missed by many IM users today when running Linux. The lead developer of the gaim-vv project now says that the Gaim project leader (now employed by Google) has killed off most of his pending CVS patches and has instead replaced them with voice-only patches, patches coming from Google which are only to be used with the Google IM protocol, leaving all other voice and all video protocols in dissarray. Update: The other side has spoken explaining the situation, but unfortunately it says nothing about webcam support for now or in the future, but only about voice.
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I modded you up again because I really couldn't see any reason for modding you down. Other than ignorance, of course.
So, for the ignorant, I'll explain:
What ma_d says is that the only reason the GP was correct, was that he didn't specify what he meant by "that", the hanging pronoun. Not specifying "this", "that", "these", "those", etc is a common mistake and usually leaves the sentence rather ambiguous at best. GP's post can then be interpreted as anything, for instance:
"Having Ignorant anti-FOSS zealots commenting on stuff they don't understand is the problem with open source."
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Sure anybody could but the likely hood of that happening is very low. The fact of the matter is the Lead Developer decided he couldn’t live on free beer alone and now has other thing he needs to work on. If it was a commercial product which had amassed this amount of market share the lead developer probably could have continued to support and enhance the product.
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Sure anybody could but the likely hood of that happening is very low.
I very much disagree. It is extremely likely that someone will fork Gaim if its lead developer really is obstructing progress on features that users really want.
Look at how many Linux distros we have that are forks created by dissatisfied users. This is where Mandrake Linux came from. Red Hat said they were relegating KDE to the backburner with only one maintainer on staff, and Mandrake stepped up to create a Red Hat compatible distro with first-class KDE support, among other things. Mandrake later evolved to be much more than this, but I think it's a good illustration of forking at its best.
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And Mandrake has now stolen the large market share that RedHat used to have or does RedHat still have the largest share of the commercial Market? Just because something is forked doesn’t mean people will Migrate in large numbers. Most will stay with the main branch the more things fork the more incompatibilities are introduced. But I suppose we could just fork again to try and solve those problems.
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Since the developer was hired by google, I guess you could expect he (as a open source developer) gives preference to the things he know better and will work to add webcam later? I want to hear both sides, I _very much_ doubt google and that developer has any interest in delaying a feature which everyone want...maybe -vv voice support is crappy and he thinks he can do it better? (though -vv seems to have a better design from the post)
Anyway, just for those who may need an OSS IM program with webcam suport, kopete CVS has webcam support for msn at least, will be available in kde 3.5...
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Eugenia, there's a link in the gaim mailing list from gaim's developer explaining why he does what it's doing, perhaps you should include it in the header? (my humble opinion 
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=8864408&foru...
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2005-08-22
I think we don't know the whole story here, so its a little wrong to start making sweeping, bloodthirsty flames about it.
But i must say it seems contrary to how most open source projects work. If there's useful code that is even the seeds of a possible feature, it shouldn't be ruled out. Maybe the lead developer doesn't want to work on it, but maybe someone else does. Especially if there's solid audio code already.
Something seems fishy here. But as long as its GPL software, there's no sense getting real pissed off about it. Someone else can take control if Google screws it.
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2005-07-11
GAIM is fortunately released under the GPL license, so anyone may modify it as they see fit.
GAIM can be forked. One being the Google GAIM and one being the GAIM with the video capability.
The two GAIMs can compete depending on the needs of its users. And as they are both released under the GPL, there will be no licensing trouble about recombing the best features of each if one so chooses.
This is where the GPL really shines.
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Basically, it is a bit dangerous for the openness of an open source project for one lead developer who has control, or a number of developers, to be employed by one company. And no, it doesn't matter how liberal the license is.
It's clear why this has happened. Sean has had pressure put on him for Gaim to basically become a Google-only IM client. Goodbye Yahoo, MSN and any other network's support. Gaim is Google's personal open source project now, and I'm surprised at Google because they should know about the politics and trouble that could ensue as a result of something like this.
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I disagree.
Supposeing Google forces Sean to remove ALL protocol compatibility besides Google. It doesn't really matter, in fact, it may be preferable.
Let Google give the FOSS community a bunch of free code. We'll take it. And then we'll start our own project.
More Free Code > Less Free Code
As long as its free, there's very little harm any corporation can actually inflict. Developers will always have the power.
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2005-11-11
The update to this story, which links to a post by one of the coders, clearly states that video is not being abandoned.
He said that Gstreamer & farsight is not mature enough to use, and that he is currently focusing on audio.
Farsight is a project concerned with audio & video for all the major IM networks, and when the gaim team consider it mature enough then they can use it, and gaim will support audio & video.
farsight is a project whose coders, I believe, are mainly concerned with aMSN. The point of the farsight project, though, is to develop support for audio & video in a way that allows any IM project to use it.
I have used the video support that aMSN offers, which I believe is done using farsight, and I have to agree that although it's good it's not mature.
Link to farsight here:
http://projects.collabora.co.uk/farsight/wiki/RoadMap
Edited 2005-11-11 15:52
