February 5, 2008
General, openwengo, wengo, work
2 Comments
I have seen a meme spread over the past few days which I’d like to correct, and hopefully nip in the bud.
The OpenWengo project did not die with the withdrawl of Wengo. Nor is it in limbo.
The torch has been passed. (PDF) Finally, in late January, the news was announced. The project has a new maintainer, Vadim Lebedev of MBDSys. Vadim has been involved in the project from the beginning - he was hired by Wengo to write the back-end code for the first prototype. His company has experience providing customisation services on top of the software. He’s absolutely the best person for the job.
I have known this for several weeks, but was asked not to announce it until an agreement had been reached between Wengo and MBDSys. I alluded to this, as Marco indicated in his blog entry, in my previous entries on the subject, as well as in email to the mailing list.
To repeat myself: this is the great thing about free software - the project can outlive the founder. Spencer Kimball and Peter Mathis lost interest in the GIMP - it took 6 months to get over that speedbump, but the project outlived them. If Alfresco goes out of business, there are enough individuals and companies invested in the project that it will live on.
Wengo has withdrawn from the OpenWengo project, and yet development continues, people are still investing in it, volunteers are still working on it. Life goes on.
Welcome to the new way of doing things.
January 14, 2008
freesoftware, openwengo, wengo, work
10 Comments
For the past few weeks (actually, the past couple of months) I’ve been holding my tongue waiting for things to clear up a bit in relation to work. I now have a pretty good idea of where I’m at, and so the time has come to break silence and reveal all.
Along with a number of my ex-colleagues, I was laid off by Wengo last November. Recently, that was noticed by a journalist who follows the OpenWengo project and got announced on the community mailing list.
At the time of the lay-off, a number of us had planned to take over maintainership of the project, move the hosting somewhere else, redo a web-site, and create a company around the project (with the business model of providing customisation services and support). Unfortunately, for a number of reasons I won’t go into, after 5 weeks of work on the new company, that fell through. And so, at the beginning of last month, I started looking around for an alternative solution that I could announce to the OpenWengo community, and to companies building offerings on top of the software.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing explicit I can say yet - the people concerned are still in discussions - but it’s looking like the OpenWengo project will not remain without a maintainer for long. As well as a lot of interest from a number of different companies, there are a number of people in the community who have proposed to pull in the slack, if needs be. That is the great thing about free software - AbiWord didn’t die with Abisource, Mozilla didn’t die with AOL’s withdrawl, and OpenWengo will survive without Wengo.
And so what about me? Well, I still plan to be involved in OpenWengo, in some way. I’m waiting, in some sense, for the battle lines to be redrawn and for procedural questions to be worked out, but I am still interested in working with companies who want OpenWengo customisations, and I plan on helping the project towards its next stable release (2.2) and beyond, on helping the community overcome the tricky step of whether or not to move to the new data model and engine CoIP Manager.
Aside from that, I now have to make a living somehow. And I’ll tell you more about that in a little while.
June 25, 2007
openwengo
3 Comments
In spite of my best intentions, I won’t be going to Lug Radio Live this year to represent OpenWengo.
The official reason is that it’s only 2 weeks before the birth of our third child, and I can’t justify going away for a day & a half during a weekend that close to the “quick, call a taxi” date.
However the real reason is because I was afraid of all the abuse I would get from the LugRadio crowd - a taster of which I got from Stuart “Aq” Langridge upon hearing that I was cancelling:
Well then you are a useless Irish bastard and we are never going to speak to you again, you pig-holding arse.
Yes, that’s right, I am an arse that can hold a pig.
Thanks to Stuart for putting into my mind the image of two beautiful plump rosy bum-cheeks grabbing a poor defenseless squealing piglet. It’s enough to give you nightmares.
June 18, 2007
openwengo, wengo
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June 18, 2007
marketing, openwengo
3 Comments
I got back to Lyon on Saturday evening after 3 days in Martigues (sun, sea, sand) and a quick trip to the “Journées du Libre à Montpellier” 2007 - a local conference organised by the ALL (Association des Logiciels Libres).
It was a very nice conference - apart from the small detail that they forgot me. Well, all’s well that ends well.
I had a nice meal & conversation on Friday evening with some members of the association (lightning struck twice - I was forgotten again) and other invited guests (who weren’t forgotten).
I was especially impressed by the president of the association, who is a fan of martial arts - he is a 1st dan black belt in Aikido and Kendo (which is his favourite) as well as having skillz in jujitsu and judo.
So I forgave him for forgetting me.
I learned the difference between a “jitsu” (dangerous) and a “do” (less dangerous).
For example, “Kenjitsu” was the art of sabre fighting, “Kendo” is the art of fighting with bamboo sticks. “Jujitsu” is a vicious fighting style with kicks, punches, chokes & holds, and “judo” just keeps the holds.
On Saturday, I caught up with Frédéric Couchet and Pascal Chevreul, from APRIL and Mozilla respectively, and saw Richard Stallman give a presentation on free software in French.
I was also very pleased to meet Thierry Stoer from formats-ouverts.org for the first time, after several email conversations.
My presentation of the WengoPhone in the demo space attracted a nice crowd and went pretty well - VoIP is a big topic at the moment and lots of people wanted to know how to hook their home Asterisk up to the Wengo service, or how to make video calls. A nice feature people seemed interested in was the file transfer (which is funny, since it’s not one of those features I use a lot, or consider important) and having a real phone number for people to call you on your VoIP phone.
The presentation afterwards got a lot more attention that me - someone showed off all of the free software games that are available these days, from Neverball and X-Moto through FPS games and flight sims, and brought people up from the crowd to show off. Good fun.
After my presentation I gave a short interview with FreeNews and Divergence FM, media partners for the event. I’ll post links when they have it online.
June 12, 2007
francais, marketing, openwengo, work
1 Comment
I was going to blog about my demo/presentation of OpenWengo at the Journées du Libre à Montpellier, but it seems like I’m not on the agenda, in spite of having had a session accepted.
I don’t know whether I’ll still go or not - but I’m a bit annoyed about being forgotten.
May 29, 2007
openwengo, wengo, work
Comments Off
For those who had planned to go to Berlin especially to catch the Openwengo workshop on Thursday, I am sorry to let you know that I will be in Paris for some important meetings, and won’t be attending LinuxTag this year.
May 22, 2007
gnome, marketing, openwengo, work
1 Comment
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting the road again.I’m eager to meet up with Openwengo and GNOME people when travelling - drop me a line if you’re available.
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LinuxDays.ch, 23 & 24 May, Geneva:
I’ll be giving two presentations during LinuxDays.ch, one on contributing to free software projects (including a focus on marketing GNOME) and one on the OpenWengo project, and our recent 2.1.0 release.
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LinuxTag, 31 May - 1 June, Berlin:
A flying visit, I’m arriving on Wednesday evening, and flying out again on Friday. I’ll be on the look-out for GNOME people, and I’ll be giving a workshop presentation of OpenWengo.
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Journées du Libre, 15 June, Montpellier:
A flying visit, I’m arriving on Friday night and training out again on Saturday evening. Looking forward to meeting up with people on Friday evening, and I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenWengo on Saturday.
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COPU Summit, 21 & 22 June, Guangzhou, China:
I was invited to this last year but couldn’t go, this year I’ll be going along to meet with Chinese distributions and spread the Free Software gostpel to a high-powered group of executives from free softwarte companies and from the Chinese government.
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LUG Radio Live, 7 July, Wolverhampton:
After exotic travel, I’ll be in the Black Country, telling LRL fans about the joys of OpenWengo, a great free software project that’s only going to get better. On condition that Anne my wife doesn’t need a lift to the hospital in the middle of the night. This will be my last travelling until after the Summer.
So there we have it. Aside from that, the company has organised a “retreat” for a few days in the South of France (oh, the pain) and I’ll be going up to Paris every week, as I have been for the last 6 months.
Ho hum.
May 15, 2007
openwengo
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It’s been long, it’s been painful, and it’s been one of those projects where I’ve been saying for weeks that we’ll be releasing very soon now, but it’s here!
The WengoPhone 2.1.0 represents a big step forward from the 2.0 release for a couple of reasons - not least is that it is stable and usable on Linux. We’ve added some major features too - secure calls with sRTP when the SIP platform supports it (which is most of the time), interoperability work to make it easier to configure accounts with SIP providers other than Wengo, a heap of usability fixes, and some nice work mby translators at LaunchPad which got us 100% translations in 13 languages - not too shabby.
Binaries are available at the OpenWengo website and source files and contrib binaries are available (or soon will be) at the developer’s community site.
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