Daniel Pocock

Discussion of the most recent release of reSIProcate, how to use it and how to get involved.

Other people: Scott Godin

A look at the challenges facing us in the world of free communications and the practical steps we can take today to move forward.

This session will discuss how we can share infrastructure and resources between projects, with the goals of reducing administrative burdens, reducing duplication of effort and increasing interoperability between our solutions. To satisfy user expectations, interoperability is more critical in the field of real-time communications than any other free software eco-system. In particular, we will look at how to share management of an event calendar, Planet sites, repositories, CI for interop testing and various other tools.

Other people: Timothée Floure

Pocock, from the reSIProcate development team, explains how to integrate SIP capabilities into new or existing C++ applications, with a quick look at some of the new APIs for AMQP and Python integration.

Which projects would like to raise funds? What are the most important things you could achieve if people donate? Could we share the effort of running a crowdfunding campaign?

Discuss the current status of the [RTC services](http://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers), opportunities for people to assist in supporting and enhancing them and look at ways they can further complement the development workflow and serve the community.

No license is required to purchase Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware or receive radio radio signals. SDR/ham radio demonstrations can be elaborate and engaging and often take a prominent position at events. There are also large events like the Jamboree On The Air (JOTA) where the possibilities free software offers for science and education can gain significant prominence. Any member of the Debian community can set up one of these demos in a few minutes using the packages produced by Debian Hams or the Debian Hams live image. In this practical BoF you can try the $20 RTL-SDR dongle on your own laptop and ask questions about the topic.

A review of the [PKI/PGP clean room project](https://danielpocock.com/dvd-based-clean-room-for-pgp-and-pki) status and discussion of future steps.

Proponents of free software are frequently asked "Can we replace Skype, Viber, Twitter and Facebook?". Is this the right question and how does it relate to free software development today and in the future? Pocock talks about the social consequences of this issue, looks at some of the successes we have had with examples based on Debian, some of the challenges that remain and ways that people can help either as developers or end users.

A quick introduction to accounting and the free software solutions available in Debian. This is a broad overview covering solutions for personal finances, freelancers, small businesses and non-profit organizations. The talk will include a demo of some of the more advanced solutions included in Debian, the Postbooks and Tryton ERP systems, both of which have features like multi-user and multi-currency support and a full SQL backend. This talk will show how free software solutions can do everything that is possible with proprietary software like Quickbooks and Sage while also giving the user more control of the underlying data and unlimited flexibility to adapt the system to meet future requirements. Many small businesses start out using a minimal solution to avoid up-front costs but then experience significant effort migrating all their data to the system they should have chosen in the first place. As free software doesn't have an up-front cost, businesses are free to choose the solution most suitable for their long term needs and grow into it even if they don't use many of the features in their first year of trading.

RTC development is a very specialized topic. Developers working in this field often have to make a serious time commitment to know it well and keep up with all the new things that are happening. This implies that people need to focus on projects that pay their wages. The projects that pay are not always the projects that deliver the best results for the wider community though. In this session, we will look at the opportunities that crowdfunding and other schemes may provide to help RTC developers spend some of their work hours on projects for the greater good.

Intro to ham radio and a brief demo of SDR capabilities in the Debian Ham blend, explaining why Debian and Ham Radio are both important parts of the SDR eco-system.

The future of Telepathy, the most popular open source real-time communications API.

Telepathy is the API used in many popular Linux desktops for integrated real-time communications. Existing protocol support in Telepathy has had some rough edges, especially for NAT traversal, but things are now changing with the emergence of the telepathy-resiprocate component and other developments. We will also look at the interaction between Telepathy and WebRTC users and Telepathy and mobile users.

At FOSDEM 2013, leading developers of free real-time communications software dared to get up on stage and ask the question "Can we replace Skype, Viber, Twitter and Facebook?". Was this the right question and how does it relate to free software development today and in the future? Pocock talks about what has changed since then and where things are going in this domain in the year ahead, especially with the emergence of WebRTC and the ubiquity of browsers that support it and the opportunities this has created for the world of web development and interaction with other open systems.

Can you imagine a world where phone communication works with all the benefits of email (but without spam)? Per-minute charges eliminated, flexibility for developers to customize the experience with standard scripting languages like Python or JavaScript and organizations of any size able to assert their identity and brand securely using SIP and XMPP addresses?

Is this a worthwhile vision? What do each of us - developers, sysadmins and end users - need to do to make it happen? What will be the alternative outcome - for both society in general and fans of free technology in particular - if we stand back and allow proprietary solutions to run rampant?

This session will survey some of the free software solutions that exist today and ways you can participate in their improvement and deployment to help realize this vision.

Lumicall is a fork of the original Sipdroid SIP phone for Android.  As far as forks go, it is one of the more innovative ones, loading up the original project with cool features like encryption (TLS, SRTP, and ZRTP), ICE for NAT traversal and ENUM dialing.

All together, it aims to provide a completely free, open and secure alternative to the popular Viber app for mobiles.  Daniel Pocock, Lumicall project founder, will look at questions like why he chose to start with the Sipdroid code base, why he uses SIP, what level of security is really achievable on a mobile device and what kind of community effort is necessary to make this initiative successful.

A panel discussion on the challenges of federated and distributed free Real-time Communications (RTC) and its significance to the Free and Open Source Software community, hosted by Daniel Pocock and Peter Saint-Andre

Other people: Peter Saint-Andre

Are you one of the people who has never installed Skype (and never will)? Do you feel a sense of frustration every time someone asks to call you with Skype? Does the excruciating inefficiency of maintaining multiple profiles across Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn give you more pain than the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard? Have you tried free and open source alternatives, but found their usefulness limited (or completely failed to get them working)? Would you like to see a way out of this nightmare?

This talk covers the depth and breadth of VoIP and all other real-time communications, encompassing desktop VoIP, instant messaging, social networking, microblogging, server solutions and also emerging areas like WebRTC, Peer-to-peer, privacy with FreedomBox and the mobile VoIP sector.

Despite this broad agenda, the presentations from each speaker have been tightly coordinated with a coherent focus on the challenges of making it all work together comprehensively and conveniently. The speakers have come together for FOSDEM with the goal of mapping out a strategy for free and open communications standards to finally take their rightful place as the dominant paradigm.

The speakers are the leaders in the flagship open source VoIP projects and will participate in a panel discussion and question/answer session in the telephony devroom immediately after the talk.

Other people: Peter Saint-Andre Bdale Garbee Simon Tennant Evan Prodromou Daniel-Constantin Mierla Emil Ivov