On 3/27/07, Chetan S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
FOSS alternatives to what ? Yahoo client ? You'll play a catch up with them for the rest of your life. They change a bit / encryption scheme and your clients will barf on you.
Well yahoo doesn't change its protocol everyday. Even if it does, it doesn't do it in a manner that older clients will barf on your because they have to take care of users with older clients. I'm using ayttm with the older version of libyahoo2. While the protocol is different and some (very few actually) features are misplaced, it certainly doesn't barf. And mind you that before a couple of months, ayttm wasn't updated for over 2-3 years. Hence, what you're saying is simply FUD.
It was only recently that OSS managed to interpret the obscure features of the Y! protocol. Forget voice and webcam. Gyach came close. however getting your webcam to work under Linux is a prayer at best.
The reason for not coming close to yahoo features is not because they're obscure but because not all of the feature set fits into the general framework of their messengers. Few messengers out there are protocol exclusive and hence they try to keep a feature set that is common to all their protocols.
Coming back to the point of VOIP ( which is the one that matters most ) unless the OSS solution does not allow user to make a call from PC to Phone or use webcam for a decent payment ( for the infrastructure ) it is esentially useless to the aam janta.
I don't understand why it matters most. Out of 100 visitors to a cyber cafe not more than 10-15 would want to do voice chat.
Talk of webcams and video editing and things like that and most seasoned Linux professionals get the creeps.
Setting up webcams is the work of an admin and not the cafe user. That too, I assume, is not very difficult as I haven't too many gripes about non-working webcams. And why do seasoned Linux professionals get creeps when you talk of video editing?
Fast , Free and works for my hardware is the only criteria for the end-users to use it.
We're talking about cafes and not end users, right?
While I endorse OSS on every front, being anal to workarounds does not work anywhere beyond techies domain.
Opposing wine as a solution is not being anal; I'm opposing the 'wash your hands off it quickly with wine' solution. Most needs are fulfilled by FOSS, they only need minor tweaking here and there. Familiarity here should not be an issue since if all/most cyber cafes are going to implement this solution then there is not real competitor. If licensing is mandatory then the windows based cafes will become expensive, making the FOSS based cafes more desirable.
@Rony - And to the question of using wine here's from the wine faq - 3.8. Do I need to have a DOS partition on my system to use Wine? You do not need a licensed and installed copy of DOS or MS Windows to install, configure or run Wine. However, Wine has to be able to 'see' an MS Windows binary (i.e. application) if it is to run it.
It still needs the proprietary apps to run them; and in some cases it is illegal to run them from wine (IE). -- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.tk -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
