Re: [rdesktop-devel] rdp patent issue?

[Johannes S. <Joh...@gm...>]

Hi,

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Mrs. Brisby wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 21:55 +0200, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> > > Today, I have the idea of implementing the rdp server on top of the X
> > > window system.  But I'm afraid that Microsoft will sue me.
> >
> > Why would you want to do that?
>
> There DOES exist a legitimate reason--- I've brought it up before.

And we keep forgetting it ;-)

> There are a bunch of RDP-only terminals out there which might be a
> factor in some operations switching to a Free platform.

Actually, I asked Jay (xrdp) about creating a library to speak RDP. He was
quite positive about it, but wanted to finish basic functionality first.
As there is a beta libvncclient in the LibVNCServer package now, that
should make it trivial to write vnc2rdp. Imagine that, running
rdp2vnc2rdp2vnc and back ;-)

Of course, vnc2rdp will be by no means optimal - vnc does not place the
burden of deciding which order to send on the programmer, but rather
always sends (compressed) bitmap updates. The solution for that would be
to connect the RDP terminals via fast ethernet to a machine running
vnc2rdp.

> Interestingly enough, VNC and RDP are actually quite similar on the
> inside such that a protocol-converter might not be unfeasible.

We have rdp2vnc already... It has a few glitches, but those should be easy
to fix.

Ciao,
Dscho