Hi Kaleb, On Sunday 07 December 2003 18:15, Kaleb S. KEITHLEY wrote: > To be a Standard though, you need to write a specification and have it > go through X.org's standardization process. A proof of concept, in the > form of an implementation, is useful too.
We have the proof of concept. Should we write such a "X image compression and streaming" specification and submit it for approval to the X consortium? Such an extension would be useless without clients leveraging it. I'm speaking about GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution and I could name many more. We need the support of the X developers otherwise it's better to use our time and resources to write a layer that don't need X apps to be aware of it. We already have hard time making a living out of writing OSS software, so I don't think we'll follow the Rule and spend development time and resources in something that, maybe, nobody will ever use. Does OSS development always follow the Rules? Fortunately not. Look at the XDamage extension. There were some talks and a sample implementation from Havoc. It solved a very real problem, so everybody agreed on it. Keith Packard wrote the specification, a better version of the code and it immediately went into the freedesktop X server. As often happens in the OSS world, somebody comes with a solution, then the OSS world elaborates it, improves it, plugs the holes and makes it a standard. We would like to follow the same OSS rule. Unfortunately we are still at the stage that most X people seem to completely ignore (or consider not worth of mention) the work we have done and the problems we are trying to solve. Obviously I think they are wrong, otherwise I would have already stopped complaining in mailing lists ;-). I'm just starting to believe that also the OSS world suffers of the 'not invented here' syndrome. I carefully read the "Open Source Desktop Technology Road Map" of Jim Gettys: http://freedesktop.org/~jg/roadmap.html It doesn't make any mention of NX. This is really sad. I'm sure Jim knows about our software, so I must argue that he thinks that X doesn't need specific X protocol compression, X image encoding and streaming, a X agent system resolving round-trips at application server side, embedding of different remote desktop protocols in X, a proxy system implementing bandwidth control, encryption, transport over a RTP network, session initiation through SIP and other things we instead need in NX. Should we write a specification for each functionality and wait the X developers to embrace them? It would be fantastic, but I don't think we have the money to live long enough to see this happen. I read in the previous document that Jim Gettys thinks that ssh -X -C or VNC are good enough for most remote computing needs. Well, I think that the proof of the pudding is in eating. I would really like to know if Jim Gettys has ever tried our software and if he had a chance to run it, side by side, with ssh -X -C or VNC. Many X people seem to forget that there is a company whose name is Citrix and another company whose name is Microsoft that have nearly the 100% of the remote computing market. Probably these X people should rather argue that ssh -X -C is no-good. Some weeks ago we received an e-mail from a company that qualified itself as a Citrix partner since 10 years. They told us that they had tried NX and were stunned by the performances. It was the first time, since 10 years, that they had something that could beat Citrix. They are now in the process of becoming distributors. And, yes, they had tried ssh -X -C and VNC. I read again the thread about NX in the old XFree86 forum. The point of Keith Packard and Jim Gettys was that the work that is taking place at freedesktop.org should make possible to run remote X applications with the same efficiency and with the same features provided by NX without any of the NX solutions to the problem. I studied the papers but I don't see any solution to the "X image encoding and streaming" problem, so I think this is a good place to start working together. And I hope, Kaleb, that your suggestion is not to do all the work by ourselves ;-). Kind regards, /Gian Filippo Pinzari. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
