Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Hi Olav

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 00:15 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 11:04:43PM +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> > FWIW, I'm extremely keen on keeping Gossip going. I personally feel that
> > Telepathy is potentially dangerous to our cause. I mean, great, you can
> > voice-video chat with your MSN friends, but you still need an MSN
> > account. One step forward, two steps back.
>
> IMO purposely not supporting something that is in some countries (like
> mine) widely used will ensure your program will not get used.
>
> Make it possible for me to chat. I don't care what method it uses (I
> prefer Jabber, but if someone is on MSN and doesn't want to use e.g.
> Google Talk, so be it). If you want to advocate free services, make the
> free services easier to use and better integrated in the application.
We would, but people seem to be more interested in high-fiving each other over abstraction layers that de-value underlying protocols.

> If a program doesn't allow me to chat with my friends (which is what
> I primarily want in an IM app), then how do you expect me ever to
> discover the benefits of a free service?
We have legacy transports that provide a basic level of support, but it will always be a balancing act, much like the reverse-engineering work in Telepathy/Farsight. Pissing away free development hours chasing a moving target wild geese just so that we can pretend to be compatible is irrefutably masochistic, and I'd really like it to stop. But when Nokia drives a truck of money up to Collabora's offices, I've no problem there, they can do what they like.