(unknown)

Hi all,
 My Salutations to John Walker for a commendable ongoing open source effort 
from one of the younger members of the group. Yup I am twenty something and 
dare to be optimistic in this doomsday world. With my experience and 
background I look at Open source as a silver lining on a very dark cloud. And 
I recently came across SF and was very happy with the direction it was going 
with NAT patches and all till I heard about Johns announcement about the End 
Of life which I think is of time but not for all his reasons. Here is what I 
think: 

After browsing through the source code, you see the simplicity and yet the 
complexity of something so aged that it is hallowed ground. I can understand 
the futility in a general sense of maintaining two different code bases 
written in C as a scalable application. 
BUT I disagree with Sir John Walker (if anybody should be knighted, its him! 
Hear! Hear! ) about the direction of P2P networking.
- NAT while a very tenacious problem exists because of IPv4 space problem. 
With open IPv6 available ISPs can be bullied if not then new ISPs with the 
open architecture will be available
- Internet Gaming point valid as already made by some on the group
- And as Kevin said in a post earlier...we the SF people will put our dollars 
and voice in favor of equal hosts and once that happens...more end users will 
also opt out of paying once for the bandwidth and then to someone for a closed 
source VoIP application...in favor of SF!! We still need the solutions like 
the NAT for now so that the end users who don't appreciate this yet will be 
able to use SF.

Also I feel the open source community needs such a solution because:
- Commercial VoIP providers should have a competitor in the open source domain 
to provide a reality check so that eventually people have an alternative when 
prices sky-rocket due to monopolies or we get more adware. 
- To my knowledge no other solution exists in the Open source domain for Linux 
for VoIP(Voice+Video). For Linux to reach desktops this is needed and SF is 
ideally positioned to meet it. 

With the agreement of the SF community, I volunteer to lead this effort based 
on SF on sourceforge. We can migrate the forums and the mailing lists there?
 
Key Ideas and design principles:
- Based on a cross platform GUI/utilities library: wxWindows (Open source, 
available on all platforms, provides native GUI+TCP/IP). Adv.: Immediate GUI 
for all unix platforms. 
- OO Design in C++. Adv: Easy scalability to new codecs (just derive classes ) 
+ Video Conf. as and when SF grows.
- Develop on existing code base for C code for compression etc. (Suitably 
modified when needed) encapsulated inside the C++ classes (which can be 
upgraded with time)
- Large following of SF (as seen on the mailing list) can offer help to 
migrate code for sections and non developers for quickly ironing out bugs ( Go 
Auriemma! ). 

I am an Electrical Engineering major with lots of development experience with 
Pascal, C, C++, Java and understand networks and computer architecture fairly 
well. I have been contributing and following the open source scene for a few 
years and really pleased with the results. 

John, please contact me off the list when you get the time, if you like this 
idea. 

- Anshuman





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