Monthly Archives: May 2010

Release libnice 0.0.12

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Hello,

Libnice 0.0.12 has just been released.. It’s not a very important release as it doesn’t add any substantial feature, but it does fix a few nasty bugs, so it’s recommended to update.

The important thing to note is that recently ICE has been standardized and is now known as RFC 5245! This is great news as it means that the spec will stop changing (it actually became stable at draft 19, so we were already safe).

The same thing happened to TURN, which has been standardized as RFC 5766. TURN has been changing a lot lately, so having it as a finalized standard is very good news.

In this release, libnice  has now a NICE_COMPATIBILITY_RFC5245 which should be used instead of the compatibility mode NICE_COMPATIBILITY_DRAFT19. Although the old code should still work since I kept the DRAFT19 symbol for legacy reasons.

The problem now is with TURN.  I never had time to upgrade TURN from the last draft that I implemented (draft 9) and since the specs of TURN kept changing, I didn’t want (nor had time) to keep updating it to meet the spec changes. So the new libnice is compatible with RFC5245 but it doesn’t support the TURN 5766 draft yet. Hopefully, the next release will be compatible with TURN RFC 5766.

If someone wants to contribute to libnice, then implementing the changes to TURN to upgrade it from draft 9 to RFC 5766 would be the first step! Let me know if you want to help.

KaKaRoTo

Humble Source

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Hi,

As some of you might have seen already, there’s this great great initiative called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s basically a group of five independent developers who decided to make a ‘pay-what-you-want’ promotion for a bundle of five games, and the money can be distributed however you want between the developers and two charities (Child’s play and Electronic Frontier Foundation).

This whole idea is really awesome! The minimum donation requested is 0.01$ so for just one cent, you could be getting 6 very awesome games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD,  Aquaria and as a bonus Samorost 2) although I hope you will be more generous than that!

I think that the initiative is indeed humble, and by giving the power back to the consumer, you let him decide on the price and ask him for his generosity, you can get some really good results.  And the proof is here.. After only 10 days, they have raised over one million dollars! 30% of that went to charity and the rest went directly to the developers! What does this mean? It means that people thought that the developers deserved the money because of this brilliant idea. This also gives us some pretty awesome statistics.

As of the moment of writing this, the average donation was 9.05$ and The distribution is  : an average of $7.95 for Windows users, $10.18 for Mac users and $14.55 for Linux users! It looks like Linux users are more generous than Mac users who are more generous than Windows users! The developer seems to have noticed this and talks about it in his blog.

You can also see the distribution of the downloads, it looks like the Linux and Mac gamers are also a big part of the gaming market. As explained in the developper’s blog :

Our most recent promotion, the Humble Indie Bundle, shows even more dramatic statistics for Linux: 52% Windows, 24% Mac, and 24% Linux.

Finally, the most interesting thing for which I want to salute those developers is that, considering the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, they decided to open source 4 of the games from the bundle! This is great news for the open source community and for the gaming community as well.

The bundle has been extended for 3 more days, so I encourage everyone to go buy these games and help the developpers who had this brilliant idea!

KaKaRoTo