Hello everyone, First of all Thinstuff would like to congratulate Marc-Andre, Jay and all others in the FreeRDP team for creating such a great product!
My name is Norbert Federa and I'm CTO at company Thinstuff which I'm running together with my long-term partner Michael Gibson. Some of you might still know me from http://rdesktop.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/rdesktop/rdesktop/trunk/doc/AUTHORS well - that was 10 years ago ... see http://www.rdesktop.org/archive ;) Back then we were running a thin client company (brand name "Thintune") which was acquired by company Neoware in 2005. That was the time when we've founded company Thinstuff for developing RDP-based server-side software. Stuff like RDSH on Windows XP/Vista/7, RDP TWAIN redirection, Adobe Flash redirection, seamless apps, etc. What we'd really like to see is a free open source RDP client implementation compatible with all major mobile and desktop operating systems providing the full set of features of the Windows RDP 7.1 client - and we think freerdp is the best candidate. Thinstuff has exhibited at CeBIT 2011 at the BITKOM Thin Client & Server Based Computing booth where some of the major thin client players had their booths next to us and proudly presented their "private rdesktop enhancements" - of course implemented as out-of-process vchannels. This really made me wonder ... Of course I do understand that they are afraid to lose their commercial advantage if they'd contribute their changes back. On the other hand these thin client companies have already received so much from the open source community. Still at CeBIT we've been talking to the very nice guys from http://openthinclient.org (probably the only thin client company which is 100% open sourced). They shared our view of this nuisance and together we came to the conclusion that it would be really cool to create a feature diff (freerdp vs. mstsc) and ask companies with a "moral obligation" or commercial interest to sponsor or directly contribute to the development of one or several of these missing features. As in "You contribute 1 piece and you will get 19 for free". We've also been thinking of some kind of freerdp alliance in order to get a decent publicity. For that reason we've invited Thomas Uhl (author of several Linux books, vice-chairman at http://www.lisog.org) for a chat. He was quite excited and the outcome was "openthinclientalliance.org"|"ZeroClientAlliance.org" ... also see http://twitter.com/tuhl/status/43988454324965376. Now Thinstuff becomes Lisog member and will drive this alliance which will be managed by Michael Gibson. Of course all of this is just in the very early beginning but it looks really promising. ... we will post more details later when the project is up and running. Meanwhile I'd also like to inform you that Thinstuff is contributing substantial human and financial resources (relative to our size of 7 people) directly to the freerdp project. In fact we have already sponsored the NLA implementation which was recently done by Marc-Andre and our employee Martin Fleisz has started working on libfreerdpgdi. Martin will continue to work full-time on FreeRDP and hopefully we will also be able to add more resources in the near future. Cheers, Norbert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Colocation vs. Managed Hosting A question and answer guide to determining the best fit for your organization - today and in the future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/internap-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Freerdp-devel mailing list Freerdp-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freerdp-devel
