XSF Discussion - 2012-12-05


  1. arcriley

    isnt there a meeting suppose to be happening here right now?

  2. Kev

    In 10 minutes, yes.

  3. stpeter

    brb

  4. Kev

    (Which is now...)

  5. stpeter returns

  6. stpeter

    who needs to be poked? ;-)

  7. Zash

    Poke all the people!

  8. stpeter

    everybody must get poked!

  9. arcriley

    bear?

  10. Alex

    Good evening

  11. stpeter

    hi Alex!

  12. Kev

    stpeter: Well, you're here, I'm here, Alex is here, Zash is here and Arc's here.

  13. Kev

    20% of those are Board, so that's got to be good enough.

  14. Zash

    :D

  15. Kev

    I wonder if Peter or I was to start the meeting, anyone would realise something was wrong...

  16. Alex

    Im am only visitor

  17. arcriley

    thats the point.

  18. Kev

    Alex: Yes. So're most of us. We only have one of Board here.

  19. Kev

    (Arc)

  20. arcriley

    there's 2

  21. Kev

    Two!

  22. Ashley

    hey there!

  23. Kev

    Hi Ashley.

  24. Kev

    With only one more Boarder, we'd have a quorum.

  25. arcriley

    i got bear's phone#

  26. stpeter

    http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/xsf/the-xsf-board-of-directors/ needs to be updated

  27. stpeter

    that might be one topic :)

  28. stpeter

    if anyone needs wordpress access, I can set you up

  29. stpeter

    that way you can edit things yourself

  30. arcriley

    that'd be good

  31. arcriley

    well i cant reach bear

  32. stpeter

    I suppose Florian is at LeWeb?

  33. Alex

    Yes he is

  34. bear

    wow - I put forward that it takes some serious *skill* to muck up timezones like I do every week

  35. arcriley

    and we got quorum

  36. arcriley

    hey bear!

  37. Kev

    Afternoon bear:)

  38. bear

    afternoon all

  39. bear

    oh - LeWeb - I guess we won't be seeing florian any time soon

  40. stpeter

    arcriley: check your email for WordPress credentials

  41. arcriley

    stpeter, got it thanks :-)

  42. bear

    do we have something to discuss with Florian at LeWeb?

  43. stpeter

    bear: no, but that's why he's not here, I assume

  44. bear

    may be a very fast meeting (which is ok IMO) - anyone have something they wish to put onto the agenda?

  45. Kev

    Board openness :)

  46. Alex

    Is this the 2nd board meeting in this new term?

  47. Ashley

    i think peter wanted to put the "update the wiki" item

  48. stpeter

    bear: not really -- FOSDEM is coming up so we have preparations to make

  49. Ashley

    put forth

  50. bear

    updating the wiki makes sense, I can do that later today

  51. stpeter

    http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/xsf/the-xsf-board-of-directors/ actually

  52. stpeter

    not wiki.xmpp.org

  53. bear

    yea, it's a wp page IIRC

  54. stpeter

    yes

  55. bear

    that and a post saying who the board and council is for 2013

  56. bear makes a note to do that later

  57. arcriley

    I'm updating that page as we speak

  58. stpeter

    bear: yes indeed

  59. stpeter

    arcriley: great

  60. bear

    nice

  61. bear

    should we try to meet next week or wait till the 19th?

  62. arcriley

    next week

  63. arcriley

    the closer we get to the holidays the harder it'll be to get quorum

  64. bear

    any opposition to next week?

  65. bear

    peter - can you update the calendar to have a meeting for next week?

  66. stpeter

    I might not be able to show up next week at this time, but I can update the calendar for sure

  67. arcriley

    anyone know where a blurb about Jason can be found?

  68. bear

    only the text he created for his application

  69. bear

    peter - if you are not present next week, is there anything specific you want to cover for fosdem prep?

  70. bear

    how about this - I'll email members, and specifically florian, to make sure that next week is good for a fosdem update in a short bit

  71. stpeter

    bear: I told Kev that I would send out a call for participation

  72. bear

    yea, I was just now reading the council log...

  73. stpeter

    (sorry, I am prepping for some training that I am about to present IRL)

  74. arcriley

    bear, this is your fourth term on the board correct?

  75. bear

    np - if I was on time this would not be an issue ;)

  76. bear

    sounds right

  77. bear

    ok, then let's do that call for participation (great idea!) and schedule a meeting for next week to keep the habit going

  78. bear

    if it's a short meeting fine

  79. bear

    anything else we need to cover now?

  80. Kev

    And then you'll schedule board openness? :)

  81. Kev

    (Although I saw that you sent a reminder of the meeting to members@, which is on the right path, thanks :))

  82. bear

    i'm going to email the board to propose that we make the board mailing list open

  83. stpeter

    Kev: as in opening up the board@ list?

  84. arcriley

    hey at least we'll have accomplished getting the board page updated :-)

  85. arcriley

    that hadn't happened in over a year

  86. Kev

    stpeter: Yes, that's what I'd quite like.

  87. arcriley

    Kev, you know there's nothing on that list right?

  88. stpeter

    arcriley: indeed :)

  89. Kev

    arcriley: Nope, no way of knowing that :

  90. Kev

    :)

  91. Kev

    (Well, that's not true, I /do/ have access to the archives, but only nefariously and I haven't looked)

  92. arcriley

    i assume its just for exec session stuff, everything so far has been on members

  93. bear

    ok, action items then: peter to email call for fosdem, arc to update board page, me to email about this meeting's minutes and next week, me to email about opening up board mailing list

  94. arcriley

    lol

  95. stpeter

    ok

  96. Kev

    arcriley: In the past there's been far too little communication about what Board are doing with members. If the solution is that everything happens on members@ instead of board@, I'm OK with that. Just not when meetings are arranged on board@ and members have no idea when they're happening etc.

  97. stpeter

    I need to disappear in order to start presenting yet

  98. Kev

    Thanks bear :)

  99. arcriley

    I think every board needs an exec session list, but yea, meetings/etc have been posted to members@

  100. bear

    ok, with no objections to the above, shall we gavel this meeting done?

  101. arcriley

    seconded.

  102. bear

    ok, thanks all for a good meeting :)

  103. Kev

    Thanks chaps.

  104. bear

    (and for kicking me in the head to remind me about timezones (again!))

  105. bear goes to find some breakfast

  106. arcriley

    breakfast at noon, long night eh?

  107. bear

    yea, I'm more on west coast time than I am east lately

  108. arcriley

    and you don't have hoards of highschoolers with mercurial push access working on your codebases in a race for points lol

  109. bear

    you be crazy son :)

  110. stpeter

    s/yet/here/ but whatever

  111. arcriley

    they've done fantastic work tho.

  112. stpeter

    oAo

  113. arcriley

    http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2012/copyleftgames -- 77 tasks done in 8 days

  114. bear

    nice!

  115. arcriley

    I think I may have convinced wesnoth to switch to xmpp for their network stack too

  116. Zash

    !!!

  117. arcriley

    Zash, trying to promote xmpp to build an open, federated game network similar to psn, xbox live, etc

  118. arcriley

    wesnoth is an easy target since they're using sdl-net and trying to migrate away from sdl

  119. Zash approves of this

  120. arcriley

    yea I think the gains can be massive. especially since, for wesnoth, they gain voice chat via opus

  121. arcriley

    most free software games don't have voice chat right now

  122. Kev

    arcriley: Do you want me to put you in contact with the Evolve guys?

  123. arcriley

    but being able to reuse their xmpp roster, being able to chat with friends in different games or using standard im clients, etc - very slick

  124. arcriley

    kev, Evolve?

  125. Kev

    Because they're XMPP-based gaming social networking.

  126. arcriley

    not aware of them

  127. Kev

    They're not Free stuff, although they're free.

  128. Kev

    Don't know if it'd be a good fit, but it might be.

  129. Kev

    They've got matchmaking code that'll work across their entire game catalogue and things.

  130. Kev

    https://www.evolvehq.com/welcome

  131. arcriley

    did they extend pubsub for this?

  132. Kev

    No.

  133. Kev

    I don't know what stanzas they're using behind the scenes, but I know it's not pubsub.

  134. arcriley

    so no personal eventing, etc either

  135. Kev

    (They're using Swift's XMPP library, which is why I know them - plus they described the matchmaking they needed and I coded it up in a weekend because it sounded fun)

  136. Kev

    Right.

  137. Kev

    I don't know if they'd be interested in working with the likes of Wesnoth, or if Wesnoth would be interested in working with them, etc.

  138. Kev

    Just that they're working on the other side of this space (the social side, rather than the game side).

  139. arcriley

    not just wesnoth, i maintain a game engine which is based on xmpp

  140. Kev

    Right, I knew that, I was just trying to find a more convenient monicker than 'all those Free games projects that need networking code and would benefit from a social side to it'.

  141. Alex

    I have worked with many gaming companies over the last years'many of them already use xmpp under the hood

  142. Kev

    Yeah. PSN too, IIRC.

  143. Kev

    The difference being that there /might/ be some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement possible with Evolve. But maybe not.

  144. arcriley

    something to look into in the future, we do need to write up a xep on what we're doing with pep and game discovery

  145. Kev

    The thing about the Evolve approach to matchmaking is that it actually tries to make the matches itself (and it's quite good at it, he says commpletely immodestly).

  146. Kev

    So instead of you looking at what all your friends want, e.g. by publishing in their PEP, you register your interest with the matchmaker and then it comes back to you when it's found you a match.

  147. arcriley

    Kev, is this documented somewhere we can look at?

  148. Kev

    So if you want to say "I want a game of Team Fortress 2 with between 17 and 23 players, or a game of PySomething with 3 players, or a game of Wesnoth with 6 players" it'll try to find something it can do to get you in a game.

  149. Kev

    arcriley: Nope, not at all.

  150. Kev

    They're not opensource guys, they've not published anything like 'how this all works' so far - I nearly got them to come to the XMPP Summit to talk about it, but failed this year.

  151. Kev

    arcriley: I think if we could get some sort of XEPpified protocol for interacting with it, it wouldn't matter so much that it's closed source (and their stuff adds additional value, so maybe they'd be game). If we could get it federating so people could use their normal XMPP accounts, the world would be a lovely place.

  152. arcriley

    Kev, i agree

  153. arcriley

    generally though closed niche services like this rarely want to invite competition

  154. Kev

    Yes. I can't say I know they'd go for it, but ISTM it would strengthen their position as well if they could add a load of Free games that interface with the social network of which they're a part.

  155. arcriley

    true

  156. arcriley

    we don't have those games right now though. need a bit more dev work first

  157. arcriley

    though at the pace these kids are screaming through tasks

  158. Kev

    Having it all federated and interoperable satisfies my Openness requirements. If Evolve is the big significant non-silo in all of this, I'm happy.

  159. arcriley

    I actually had 2 of them ask if we had any assembly they could do

  160. Kev

    (And the various other things they have, like the overlay, the VOIP, the VPN etc. mean they have value add over a generic free solution, etc.)

  161. Kev

    Hah, that's not bad going.

  162. arcriley

    Kev, yea though they should really be using Jingle/Opus not their own voip/silk setup

  163. Kev

    No argument - although I do know why they did what they did.

  164. Kev

    They already had all the VPN virtual party stuff, so they just do LAN-ish stuff and don't need much negotiation.

  165. Kev

    (Also, Swiften doesn't have Jingle VOIP support yet :))

  166. arcriley

    yea you should get on that

  167. Kev

    That and a million other things, yes.

  168. Kev

    It'd be fun to create some wrapper around Swiften so game devs could just drop it into place and have in-game VOIP, chat, etc. and the game just needed to provide the UI.

  169. arcriley

    so as much as i hate promoting vaporware we're starting to work on a OpenSLES stack for desktops, and pushing the khronos group's spec maintainer to add Opus as a codec flag. the signifigance here is it'd ease jingle code portability. one of the hardest things to do is interface with audio hardware

  170. Kev

    At what level is this?

  171. Kev

    C/C++/Python?

  172. Kev

    Because yes, if the audio/video interfacing was easy, we'd probably have done Jingle by now.

  173. arcriley

    C - OS-level. OpenSLES is a standard component of Android 2.3+

  174. Kev

    Ah, OK.

  175. arcriley

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSL_ES

  176. Kev

    Well, when you have it working on a desktop and I can grab it and try it, please shout.

  177. arcriley

    it handles audio in/out, codecs, syncing, etc

  178. Kev

    Audio only?

  179. arcriley

    yea it stands for Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems. the sound counterpart to OpenGLES

  180. arcriley

    but its designed such that it can work with OpenMAX

  181. arcriley

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMAX

  182. Kev

    Yep, I'm there.

  183. arcriley

    actually for general purpose jingle openmax would make more sense and there's already desktop libraries for it

  184. arcriley

    android support for openmax is very, very new though.

  185. Kev

    Android support isn't so important for me, it's Win/Lin/Mac that I care about most :)

  186. arcriley

    Yea and you don't need 3d audio like games do

  187. Kev

    Yep.

  188. arcriley

    AFAIK OpenMax is already implemented on win/lin/mac so there ya go

  189. Kev

    Ooooh :)

  190. Kev

    Now, I wonder how bad the API is :)

  191. arcriley

    its not bad at all.

  192. arcriley

    khronos group is kinda known for being fairly basic

  193. arcriley

    and one thing you know is that the api is sure the hell not going to change.

  194. arcriley

    opengl 1.1 is still supported after all these years. :-)

  195. arcriley

    though i may be tainted since i work with their stuff every day.

  196. Kev

    So http://limoa.sourceforge.net/ is the desktop implementation you were saying I should look at?

  197. arcriley

    there's a few. i haven't used any of them

  198. arcriley

    we may add openmax support to boom eventually, but right now the target is 3d audio

  199. Kev

    Boom?

  200. arcriley

    http://hg.copyleftgames.org/boom

  201. arcriley

    the OpenSLES implementation we just started last night.

  202. Kev

    Ah.

  203. Kev

    AGPL isn't Swift-friendly anyway.

  204. arcriley

    AGPL doesn't extend to the user level from os-level

  205. Kev

    ?

  206. arcriley

    have you read the license?

  207. Kev

    No, I just know it as GPL plus a bit, and Swift doesn't use GPL inbound.

  208. arcriley

    Boom is a "System Library". the AGPLv3 only extends to it, its build system, libraries it uses, etc.

  209. arcriley

    the API, via the headers, are actually under a permissive license and freely available from many sources. it doesn't matter which implementation you build on - the license doesn't apply to your code.

  210. Kev

    It does matter if we're shipping this stuff, though - we couldn't, for example, ship to the Apple App Store, if we wanted to, if we were bundling an (A)GPL library.

  211. Kev

    Not that I think we want to.

  212. arcriley

    that's kinda the point. :-) but you shouldn't need to, Apple should already be providing their own OpenSLES stack.

  213. arcriley

    also you realize that bundling two packages together in one distributable does not, itself, apply the GPL right?

  214. arcriley

    read the license. specifically the parts of section 1 regarding Standard Interface and System Libraries, and section 5 on aggregate works (combining multiple pieces of software in the same zipfile or cd)

  215. arcriley

    moot in regards to apple's itunes store since they forbid copyleft work from their store, so *they* wouldn't let you upload a AGPLv3 component

  216. arcriley

    but for something like windows, you could distribute even a proprietary app that included a libSLES.dll created by boom in the same installable, so long as none of the custom extensions we supply were used (which are out of scope for the "standard interface")

  217. Kev

    arcriley: It means that parts of the distributable are under the GPL - and you can't use GPL in appstore-like-things, because of the requirement to distribute everything needed, including the encryption keys.

  218. Kev

    (Sorry, wandered away)

  219. arcriley

    yea as i said, apple wouldn't allow it

  220. arcriley

    but again, apple should have their own OpenMax/OpenSLES implementations. you shouldn't be providing that to them.

  221. Kev

    Not just Apple wouldn't allow it (although they explicitly forbid it), but that anything that involves code signing prohibits it.

  222. Kev

    And yes, Apple probably do - but that's the reason we don't use GPLish stuff. As you say, it should be available on platforms already and the interface is open, so it's OK, but that wouldn't specifically allow us to use Boom in these cases.

  223. Kev

    (Just some other OpenSLES implementation)

  224. arcriley

    you don't *use* any specific implementation, you use the standard interface, because its a standard, and let the distro or OS people decide what implementation of it to provide

  225. arcriley

    thats what makes this a system library :-)

  226. Kev

    Yes, I understand.

  227. arcriley

    the point of it is, because of it, OpenSLES becomes a valid target for cross platform software, rather than having to use one of the many OpenAL libraries that are poorly maintained and largely bitrotten from neglect