FC: Who are you and what do you do?
MX: My name is Michel Xhaard, I am a Physician and work in Doppler and Ultrasound imaging for years. I am now near 60 years old.
FC: Interesting, as it kind of breaks the "young school kit" stereotype of the Linux advocates. When did you start in this project and why?.
MX: I started working on the
"spca50x" project in 2003, when I bought two webcams for my daughters for Christmas but there was no support under Linux for those.
FC: So you decided to take matters in your own hands. How did you know where to start?
MX: After asking the
gPhoto team, Till Adam (
http://hubbahubba.de/) and Thomas G. (
http://home.tiscali.dk/tomasgc/labtec/) provided me with some useful help to start. Few weeks later we had full support of the Sunplus spca504b chipset in Gphoto -userspace picture support- and Spca50x for video streaming.
FC: Why "GSPCA"? What does it stand for?
MX: "Generic Software Package for Camera Adapters"
FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.
Linux application GnomeMeeting (Netmeeting clone, now renamed Ekiga)
detecting USB webcam
FC: May I ask you why you decided to host your project web site on Free.FR? Don't you think Sourceforge.Net or other such OSS project repository would be more appropriate? What if Free.FR disappears?. In a sense, don't you think it's as risky as hosting an OSS project on Geocities or Tripod?
MX: I like "free.fr" because it is, well, free
Have you seen the same content in Geocities.com or tripod.com ??. Check out
ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/
Also, you can be sure that "free.fr" will not disappear. I personally don't like Sourceforge.net because it can be at times too slow, and there's a lot of dead projects ...
FC: Are you aware that your site is not very well indexed?. I came across not one but three pages claiming that the ZC0301 was not supported, or that there was a Linux driver project, which got abandoned (true, but outdated). Don't you think that having a domain name would help?
MX: Yes.