XSF Discussion - 2012-12-05

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

In 10 minutes, yes.

brb

(Which is now...)

who needs to be poked? ;-)

Poke all the people!

everybody must get poked!

bear?

Good evening

hi Alex!

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

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

:D

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

Im am only visitor

thats the point.

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

(Arc)

there's 2

Two!

hey there!

Hi Ashley.

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

i got bear's phone#

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

that might be one topic :)

if anyone needs wordpress access, I can set you up

that way you can edit things yourself

that'd be good

well i cant reach bear

I suppose Florian is at LeWeb?

Yes he is

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

and we got quorum

hey bear!

Afternoon bear:)

afternoon all

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

arcriley: check your email for WordPress credentials

stpeter, got it thanks :-)

do we have something to discuss with Florian at LeWeb?

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

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

Board openness :)

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

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

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

put forth

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

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

not wiki.xmpp.org

yea, it's a wp page IIRC

yes

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

I'm updating that page as we speak

bear: yes indeed

arcriley: great

nice

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

next week

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

any opposition to next week?

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

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

anyone know where a blurb about Jason can be found?

only the text he created for his application

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sounds right

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

if it's a short meeting fine

anything else we need to cover now?

And then you'll schedule board openness? :)

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

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

Kev: as in opening up the board@ list?

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

that hadn't happened in over a year

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

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

arcriley: indeed :)

arcriley: Nope, no way of knowing that :

:)

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

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

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

lol

ok

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.

I need to disappear in order to start presenting yet

Thanks bear :)

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

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

seconded.

ok, thanks all for a good meeting :)

Thanks chaps.

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

breakfast at noon, long night eh?

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

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

you be crazy son :)

s/yet/here/ but whatever

they've done fantastic work tho.

oAo

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

nice!

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

!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

kev, Evolve?

Because they're XMPP-based gaming social networking.

not aware of them

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

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

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

https://www.evolvehq.com/welcome

did they extend pubsub for this?

No.

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

so no personal eventing, etc either

(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)

Right.

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.

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

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

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'.

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

Yeah. PSN too, IIRC.

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

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

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).

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.

Kev, is this documented somewhere we can look at?

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.

arcriley: Nope, not at all.

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.

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.

Kev, i agree

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

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.

true

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

though at the pace these kids are screaming through tasks

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.

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

(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.)

Hah, that's not bad going.

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

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

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

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

yea you should get on that

That and a million other things, yes.

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.

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

At what level is this?

C/C++/Python?

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

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

Ah, OK.

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

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

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

Audio only?

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

but its designed such that it can work with OpenMAX

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

Yep, I'm there.

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

android support for openmax is very, very new though.

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

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

Yep.

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

Ooooh :)

Now, I wonder how bad the API is :)

its not bad at all.

khronos group is kinda known for being fairly basic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boom?

http://hg.copyleftgames.org/boom

the OpenSLES implementation we just started last night.

Ah.

AGPL isn't Swift-friendly anyway.

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

?

have you read the license?

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

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

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.

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.

Not that I think we want to.

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

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

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)

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

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")

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.

(Sorry, wandered away)

yea as i said, apple wouldn't allow it

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

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

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.

(Just some other OpenSLES implementation)

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

thats what makes this a system library :-)

Yes, I understand.

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