As I was looking over my list of application and screen sharing tools and I asked myself what I intend to benefit or gain from analyzing the closed source solutions. The open source solution are great as if I find good functions in them, I can copy, adjust and insert the code fragments in my final solution rather then reinvent the wheel.
One reason may for the completeness of the project and be able to compare my final project to the popular solutions in case somebody asked me how my solution is better. One of other reasons I think is to learn the user interface design and style which may be working well with many users. Many of these tools boast of firewall friendliness and this would be very helpful. There may also be things of interest in the bandwidth behavior. A key factor to always keep in mind is the time factor, cannot be spending more then the two years on this.
One of the adjustments I made to my attributes of analyzing the tools for Part 1 is that I removed the protocols attributes, signaling and media protocols. I guess I should approach all with the idea that “there are many things I don’t know that I don’t know” as a wise man said.
I have also discovered that the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) used in their terminal services is derived from the ITU-T T.128 standard. This lets me think to dig a little more into the T.120 series.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: I have come to realize that there is a way of getting information on the design of closed source solution via patents. It is logical that any software company claiming originality and ownership of idea, they would have to patent it and these patents should be public. More on this I would post in a later post (Incoorparating Closed Sourced Software Design in Patents ’11). An example of a solution for which I was looking for its design is an replicated application sharing solution at HP labs in 1998. The designs I found in patents.
