[Draft]

Abstract

Openmeetings is a web conferencing solution.

Proposal

Openmeetings provides video conferencing, instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools, on the top of Red5 media server.

Background

Openmeetings was developed for two years by Sebastian Wagner and willing developers. The project ships a release approximately once per quarter. It was developed using LGPL license, and developers are currently thinking of re-licensing it under Apache License 2.0.

Rationale

Last year most major vendors started commercial web conferencing solutions. This is an important part of software ecosystem, and there is an urge to consolidate open source development efforts in this direction.

Openmeetings is a unique solution in terms of patent purity and potentially can grow into solution built on the top of the fully open source stack. That is why it is a good candidate for consolidating web conferencing community efforts.

Initial Goals

Each of project committers has their own set of goals, but we all share the following.

Move to Apache.
Become popular.

To become popular we plan to do the following.

Improve ecosystem around the project.
Improve release process.
Improve project testing and stability.
Apply modular architecture/SOA for better integration with other projects.

Current Status

Discussing move into Apache.

Meritocracy

Developers community is successfully driven by consensus now. If there are more developers on board, consensus may turn into meritocracy.

Community

The developer community is pretty small, but active. The mailing list is active with dozens of messages every day, mostly user support topics.

Core Developers

Sebastian has started the application two years ago. Current development team counts 21 programmers from Germany, Russia, China, India and South America.

Alignment

The project provides a safe ground for Apache for entering a complex field of video streaming. It avoids complex patenting issues by using proprietary Adobe Flash. From the other side it may grow into independent solution because it uses OpenLaszlo RIA framework rather than a particular proprietary vendor language, and after framework evolves can use other backend representations such as javascript.

Known Risks

Orphaned Projects

Openmeetings project has developed a sufficient functionality to be a popular solution for a small businesses. The number of site visits increased from 10,000 to 20,000 in October which is a good sign of people interest. We believe that visitors convert to users, and users convert to developers in a some standard rate.

Inexperience With Open Source

Two committers have GSoC experience. One committer is an Apache committer. The project exists for two years already as an open source project.

Reliance On Salaried Developers

Telecom Express pays to Rodion for working on Openmeetings. Other contributors from that company work for the project in their spare time.

Relationships with Other Apache Products

Web application part of Openmeetings runs under Apache Tomcat. It uses Commons and Velocity. Red5 server uses a lot of Apache components, including Apache Mina.

Initial Source

http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/

External Dependencies

Adobe Flash (by means of OpenLaszlo) and open source projects compliant with current Apache policy.

Cryptography

Required to check signatures.

Required Resources

Mailing lists:

openmeetings-private
openmeetings-users
openmeetings-dev
openmeetings-commits

Subversion Directory: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/openmeetings

Issue Tracking: JIRA (OPENMEETINGS)

Other Resources: Continuous integration may eventually require hardware

Initial Committers

Sebastian Wagner <seba.wagner at gmail.com>
Smoeker <o.becherer at medint.de>
Rodion Volkov <volkov.rodion at gmail.com>
Alexei Fedotov <aaf at apache.org>
Evgeny Rovinsky <e.rovinsky at gmail.com>

If any other existing Apache or Openmeetings committers would like to be grandfathered into the list then feel free to ask.

OpenmeetingsProposal