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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] Fwd: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] NX Project Announcement
From:       "Kurt Pfeifle" <kpfeifle () danka ! de>
Date:       2003-04-01 21:59:49
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi,

this is an outline of the plans of "NoMachine" for their NX technology.
Some of you have already "testdriven" it. It is a very, very fast
remote X application (plus VNC/RFP, plus rdesktop/RDP), even over slow
connections (achieving its advantage through some clever compression and
caching technology).

All the core libraries and developements by them are released under
GPL. Here they explain, what their business model is (after all they
are a company and want to make a living) and what they are offering
to interested Free Software/OSS projects, who want to build their own
GUI frontends on top of the same technology.

Please consider to "testdrive" NX to see with your own eyes if you
haven't done it yet:

   http://www.nomachine.com/testdrive.php

I think this is a brilliant opportunity for KDE (and GNOME, and LTSP,
and Linux, *BSD etc. in general) to gain important ground in the
struggle for the enterprise desktop.

It would be great if someone could tackle the task for 3.2 already,
and implement a KDE-frontend to the NX technology.

Cheers,
Kurt




-------- Original Message --------
From: Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari@medialogic.it>
To: Kurt Pfeifle <kpfeifle@danka.de>
Reply-To: pinzari@medialogic.it
Organization: Medialogic - Italy
Subject: Fwd: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] NX Project Announcement
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 22:42:06 +0200

FYI.

We are still interested in KDE integration and support.

Any advice?

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] NX Project Announcement
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 22:31:33 +0200
From: Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari@medialogic.it>
To: jam@McQuil.Com
Cc: ltsp-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net, ltsp-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 03:50 am, jam@McQuil.Com wrote:
> I think at this point, i'm very impressed with what you
> guys have done, and I'd like to push forward with a plan
> to collaborate on integrating some of your technology into
> the LTSP, to provide a seemless method of deploying low bandwidth
> X windows.

We were talking about this, here at NoMachine, long before NX
announcement was made public. We would be glad to see this
to happen. We just want to avoid all the problems Medialogic
(our parent company) had working on a famous OSS Instant
Messaging technology, two or three years ago. Problems came
from the fact that server development was forked in two different
versions. The OSS version was lacking most of the features of
the commercial version and the developers of the OSS version
were not working on any of them because they didn't believe
such features were important. Many developers complained that
being, at the same time, a core developer of the OSS version
and an employee of the commercial company was not helping
in this respect, and maybe they were right. For sure OSS version
had to be under control of the community, not the commercial
entity, and had to have a chance to compete with it.

We already released all the core software as GPL. I don't know
if we could do more. We don't plan to sell or sublicense our core
software or implement proprietary extensions. It could make
sense 2 years ago, when most of the design and implementation
had still to take place. Today, 99% of the work is already done
and the code is free as in GPL. X is a very low-level technology
and interoperability is a paramount. Whatever improvement I can
think of, it would not be enough to make people switch to a
proprietary, incompatible version.

Our business model is to provide server infrastructure, mana-
geability tools, support, and custom client development. When
I say "custom client development" I mean a client that use a
special smartcard device or just a different startup banner, not
a client offering better compression. To let X-Window and NX
succeed we need desktop integration and a lot of available clients.
We even need different servers developed by some other OSS
or commercial company. Any user switched from proprietary
technologies to X-Window is a potential NoMachine customer.

We had a meeting today and discussed some technical details.
We will develop a library to let clients handle all the socket
communication with SSH and the remote NX server. Using this
library it will be possible to write a command line client, as well
as a client using QT or GTK toolkits. This same library will be used
by our client. This should ensure we play fair :-).

The client library will provide abstraction and implementation of all
the operations needed to start a session on a remote, NX enabled,
host. For "NX enabled host" we intend a Unix machine offering a
SSH server and all the NX components released by NoMachine
as OSS. To test the library, we will even provide a sample NX
server implementation. By doing so we will be forced to "standardize"
the server interface. We will implement all the advanced server
features on top of this protocol, so that alternative server
implementations will be possible based on the same interface.

I look forward for your comments,

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.

--
Gian Filippo Pinzari
Amministratore Delegato
Medialogic S.p.A.



 
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