Archive for November 17th, 2005

Posted on November 17, 2005 - by jono

Collaboration

Recorded LUGRadio Episode 3 last night and it was fun. Plenty of different things to discuss, an interesting interview, and the usual array of fun and banter. The show is out on Monday.

Yesterday Paul and I started poncing around with Asterisk@Home. We have been intending to fiddle with it for a while, so down in the demo lab I installed A@H and then we both explored the configuration. Within an hour or so we had two phone extensions set up and we could call between the phones on the network. We also got Linphone rolled into the mix. All of this wondrous delight was configurable with the Asterisk web interface. This was far easier than I expected. I was half expecting to be thrown into the kind of acronym hell that telephony typically affords – aside from your PSTN, you need to know your FXS from your FXO, and then decide if you want SIP or IAX, and finally consider all the wonderful codecs that you don’t actually give a shit about. A@H made all of this much easier to digest. I plan on continuing the aforementioned poncing tomorrow.

I have been thinking a lot about collaboration recently, and I really think it can hook into the vision for the desktop I have outlined in Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop. With some of the recent discussion about whether Gobby should be part of GNOME, it seems to make better sense to allow collaboration to occur at the application level and not have a specific tool that needs to be bodged into satisfying 100 desperate requirements. We really need to take libgobby and integrate it into Abiword, OpenOffice.org, F-Spot and other applications, and with a consistent interface for establishing and running collaboration sessions, this would be a really killer feature for the Linux desktop.

Whether it happens is really up to the developers. In the desktop development community it seems that clear solutions appear to solve certain problems (think cairo, avahi, hal, dbus, udev etc), and I hope Gobby can become the solution for collaboration. This stuff really needs to happen. What do you folks think? Is collaboration that important in the desktop. Would you find it a cool feature to use?