Open Thin Client Alliance (OTCA)

Everything started with a meeting at CeBit 2011. Michael Gibson (ThinStuff), Norbert Federa (ThinStuff), Alexander Stecher (OpenThinClient) agreed that we should set up an alliance to support an Open Source software stack for the next thinclients based on ARM. A few weeks later we startet the www.openthinclientalliance.org web server.
Thinstuff already supported the FreeRDP project. Marc-André Moreau is the maintainter of this rdesktop fork. The main goal of FreeRDP is to implement a fullfeatured RDP software stack which is fully interoperable with the Microsoft server implementations. FreeRDP already got a remoteFX decoder recently.

To get more companies behind the OTCA the FreeRDP project decided to do a relicensing from GPL to Apache License(APLv2). Marc-Andre asked all contributors to FreeRDP to get the acknowledgement for the license change. Most of them agreed. OTCA sponsored a Black Duck IP scan. Black Duck only found one single file which was not compliant. So we think Marc-Andre made a very good job.

The new license allows us to talk to all ThinClient companies. They can join the OTCA even if they produce proprietary products. We hope to get all of them. A port of FreeRDP to Apple AppStore is also possible now. I think this good news. The OSII project thinks of sponsoring some interesting ports.

My personal interest in FreeRDP is a serverside support for Linux desktops. Jay Sorg already implemented a X-Server which can be accessed via RDP: xrdp. The big question for me is, what happends when X11 has died? Is there a better option for remoting? After some investigantion I think we should try to use cario. Cairo is the base of many Open Source projects. Cario is cross planform and supports different backend. A cairo remoting backand might be an interesting alternative to the xrdp X11 backend. Jay Sorg hopefully will look into that option soon.