In December 2009 Red Hat announced the conversion of SPICE, the remote desktop protocol invented by Qumranet, into an open source technology.
It’s too early to understand if the move will facilitate or not the adoption of SPICE against Microsoft RDP (and its upcoming enhancement RemoteFX), Citrix HDX and VMware/Teradici PCoIP.
The first feedback is not exactly positive: the open source version of Red Hat SPICE protocol is unusable says Virtual Bridges.
Meanwhile SPICE has been included in the freedesktop.org project, an organization born exactly ten years ago to “encourage cooperation among open source desktops for the X Window System”.
The mission statement, edited last time three years ago, doesn’t seem to include specific goals around VDI:
- Collect existing specifications, standards, and documents related to X desktop interoperability and make them available in a central location;
- Promote the development of new specifications and standards to be shared among multiple X desktops;
- Integrate desktop-specific standards into broader standards efforts, such as Linux Standard Base and the ICCCM;
- Work on the implementation of these standards in specific X desktops;
- Serve as a neutral forum for sharing ideas about X desktop technology;
- Implement technologies that further X desktop interoperability and free X desktops in general;
- Promote X desktops and X desktop standards to application authors, both commercial and volunteer;
- Communicate with the developers of free operating system kernels, the X Window System itself, free OS distributions, and so on to address desktop-related problems;
- Provide CVS, web hosting, mailing lists, and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.