Decibel gets up steam

service architecture for multi-media based communication

[On 31 May 2006, Stefan Eilers reports:] Decibel has seen some changes to the original plans. As one of our aims is to integrate the framework seamlessly into the desktop, Decibel has now become an official KDE project. This helps us contact its community for assistance and feedback. This will hopefully decrease their prejudices against companies and Open Source projects. As a first result, a developer came forward interested to do the desktop integration with us.

Furthermore, We compared the Telepathy project with the Tapioca project. On first impression, both seemed fairly the same, and we ignored Tapioca a little bit. However, looking more deeply we learned that Tapioca fits to our vision much better. Both Tapioka and Telepathy is developed by Gnome devoted developers. But the Tapioca developers are working at the Nokia institute for technology and they are thinking less religious and more like engineers. Switching over, we will not loose the Gnome community but will gain the better communicative counterpart. But there are technical advantages, too. While Telepathy lacked a clear interface to user space, Tapioca does already have a desktop API, allowing us to focus on the framework alone.

To summarize our progress:

• The community process is starting off.
• Using KDE as example implementation, we are now more visible in the community.
• The basis framework needs some improvements but is already in good shape.
• The members of the Tapioca project are really motivated to work with us.
• While the framework itself will stay independent to any desktop environment, we will be able to use KDE as demonstration platform.