Accessing Vidyo Meetings Using Free Software: Help Needed

For a long time now, Mozilla has been a heavy user of the Vidyo video-conferencing system. Like Skype, it’s a “pretty much just works” solution where, sadly, the free software and open standards solutions don’t yet cut it in terms of usability. We hope WebRTC might change this. Anyway, in the mean time, we use it, which means that Mozilla staff have had to use a proprietary client, and those without a Vidyo login of their own have had to use a Flash applet. Ick. (I use a dedicated Android tablet for Vidyo, so I don’t have to install either.)

However, this sad situation may now have changed. In this bug, it seems that SIP and H.263/H.264 gateways have been enabled on our Vidyo setup, which should enable people to call in using standards-compliant free software clients. However, I can’t get video to work properly, using Linphone. Is there anyone out there in the Mozilla world who can read the bug and figure out how to do it?

It’s Not All About Efficiency

Delegation is not merely a way to spread the workload around; it is also a political and social tool. Consider all the effects when you ask someone to do something. The most obvious effect is that, if he accepts, he does the task and you don’t. But another effect is that he is made aware that you trusted him to handle the task. Furthermore, if you made the request in a public forum, then he knows that others in the group have been made aware of that trust too. He may also feel some pressure to accept, which means you must ask in a way that allows him to decline gracefully if he doesn’t really want the job. If the task requires coordination with others in the project, you are effectively proposing that he become more involved, form bonds that might not otherwise have been formed, and perhaps become a source of authority in some subdomain of the project. The added involvement may be daunting, or it may lead him to become engaged in other ways as well, from an increased feeling of overall commitment.

Because of all these effects, it often makes sense to ask someone else to do something even when you know you could do it faster or better yourself.

— Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software