Re: [Linphone-developers] bug tracker

[Eli Burke]

Anton Pomozov has covered the parts of your email relevant to him; I just want 
to add a few more points. The low message traffic on this mailing list, and the 
infrequent communications from the developers may give you the impression that 
nothing is going on, or that no contributions have been made in two years.

That could not be further from the truth. I’ve been following linphone for just 
overt two years, and the developers have made a huge number of changes in that 
time. The iPhone and Android clients have had major updates (and presumably  
Windows Mobile and desktop Windows / Mac / Linux as well). At the library 
level, OpenSSL was replaced with PolarSSL. zrtpcpp was replaced with an 
in-house implementation called bzrtp. eXoSIP was replaced with an in-house 
implementation called belle-sip. g729 has been implemented as bcg629. They are 
also working on their own SIP service, and have added remote account 
provisioning, file transfer and inline images for SIMPLE chat, presence / 
subscriptions, and at the transport level, DTLS and RTP feedback profiles. It’s 
pretty modern stuff, as far as SIP stacks go.

Granted, some of these changes would qualify as treading water: I imagine they 
are re-implementing libraries to have more control over the implementation, or 
more likely, for licensing reasons. They now have unencumbered versions of 
everything but the VIDEO subsystem. So there is plenty of activity going on.

It’s also clear from the source, and from their messages, that they do have a 
significant investment in automated build systems, source control, and bug 
tracking. It’s just all opaque to us because we are not the customers. 
Belladonne is not a non-profit organization. The source code is open, which is 
great for us, but Belladonne is a business. They are not likely to answer 
feature requests that don’t align with their business model, or pay much 
attention to bugs that don’t affect paying customers. If you are willing to 
help then great, do it. Post patches here. Maybe someone can use them, or maybe 
they will be integrated into the master source.

-Eli

> Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 01:59:05 -0800
> From: Test Sv <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Linphone-developers] bug tracker
> 
> Hello;
> 
> I find the email from Anton Pomozov is very disappointing and concerning. The 
> email is nothing more than excuses and lip service.
> 
> He is trying to make sound that they received hundreds or thousands of emails 
> every day, and they need such a sophisticated and expensive system to manage 
> all of that info, while in reality, it is only one or few emails every day 
> (based on what I receive).
> 
> While many developers (including myself) are welling and able to help the 
> project in different ways, his response is: if you think you can do a better 
> job,, start your own fork and project yourself, instead of welcoming new 
> contributors to the projects as part of the team, as typical of the open 
> source community. I wonder if he will answer by saying that small team is 
> easier to manage?.
> 
> He is trying to give the impression that they do such a huge amount of work, 
> while in reality, they have not done any meaningful contribution to the 
> project for almost two years, and do not answer almost any of the emails thay 
> get.
> 
> The project team is very secretive and closed in a very unusual way. There is 
> no openness or transparency of any kind, and do not welcome any outsiders. 
> This is completely against everything that the open source comunity 
> represents.
> 
> He raised the issue of if someone has enough money, he can start his own fork 
> and project which raised another issue if the project team is working full 
> time on the project, and where they are getting their financial support?, if 
> it is their money, or from other sources?. However, once again the team is 
> very closed and secretive and do not welcome any outsiders?.
> 
> For the record, I noticed in the last few years that number of so called open 
> source project that operate in a similar fashion is increasing. There are 
> even few open source projects that do not disclose their source code?, so 
> much for the open source?.
> 
> Finally, I agree with the comment by another developer that linphone software 
> is a nice piece of software (but with many issues), and that is why they like 
> to support it, NOT to beak away?.
> 
> Regads;
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 1/12/15, Anton Pomozov <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Subject: Re: [Linphone-developers] bug tracker
> To: address@hidden
> Date: Monday, January 12, 2015, 5:16 AM
> 
> It is not as simple as
> someone may imagine.
> "Just create
> bug-tracker" is a one small step at a long long yellow
> brick road.
> 
> In addition to
> the public bug-tracker you still need CVS, automatic build
> and deploy system, CI and test servers.
> All
> of them should be tight integrate to minimize efforts of
> developers to integrate patches and apply changes.
> To "simple apply patch" you should
> have big number of test cases of all kinds - unit,
> functionality, regress, integrate.
> You also
> should have wide and enough smart workflow for fixing issue,
> apply patch, develop new branch with new functionality or
> bug fixing in release branches.
> Someone
> should support documentation for all this stuff and for
> projects API, user stories, etc.
> 
> Does anyone of you have enough time, money and
> knowledge to build whole infrastructure for that project?
> If you can do all this stuff and keep it
> opensource and free (at least for non commercial use) just
> fork a current project and go ahead!
> Everyone of us will say thank you very much!
> 
> Through some kind of magic
> this project still alive and it is good enough to use it for
> our purposes, and many thanks to the maintainers for
> this.

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