On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 19:22 -0400, Luis Villa wrote: > Lets not fall into the lazy trap of pretending that because something > is no-cost that it is effectively the same as being libre-free (or > even the same as being pragmatically open.) I didn't mean to suggest any of Google's services were libre-free; I was merely saying that they're free-as-in-beer and a lot more well-documented than other protocols. Bad wording on my part. > Or to put it a different way: feel free to argue for it as a necessary > evil; that has been and will continue to be the kind of compromise > that GNOME has to make sometimes. But please don't pretend that > because it is no-cost that that somehow makes it OK. I personally think that Google's services are fine; a "necessary evil", if you will. They may not be libre-free, but they're in wide use, and having access to Google services from the desktop will consequently be useful to many people. > Specifically to this point, things like flash and other codecs that we > have worked out support for are broadly used by hundreds of thousands > (millions?) of people and data providers. gdata... not so much. So > work with me here: > > * is there any reason to believe that there is a trend towards > adoption here that we should be aware of? In other words, is this soon > going to be well beyond Google, and we should be ready for it? that > would be a good argument here; that's basically why we're OK with > libswf. Data points that one might muster to prove this would include > that open source CMSs (or other open source web-based software) has > libraries or plugins that publish gdata endpoints. If GData is adopted well beyond Google's services, I think it will take a while. I've just trawled the web for examples of non-Google services which publish GData APIs, and all I could find were these: * http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/GdataServer * http://drupal.org/node/60490 both of which look dead. There were a few attempts to revive the Drupal GData project in 2008; I don't know what became of them. > * if it isn't going to spread beyond google (or we have no reason to > believe so, at any rate) is there a reason to think that google is > special/important enough that we should compromise our values here? Is > there a good tactical reason for it? (I'd say that this, roughly, is > our relationship to SMB.) (There may be; I'm open to that possibility > but don't see it argued for yet.) As I said above, Google services are very widely used, but I can't speak for everyone and say whether that's a good enough reason for adoption. Obviously there have been a few people giving unconditional +1s to moving libgdata into the desktop set; but there have also been the same number raising concerns such as yours. > * alternately, are there ways to make this more general and support > alternatives? In other words, should this be a general purpose > web-data library (perhaps an atompub library?) in which gdata is but > one mode? Should it be integrated with some other, pre-existing > network connection or data protocol library? In its current state, it would take quite some work to make libgdata more generalised, if it would work at all. I haven't really looked into other web APIs enough to be able to say whether a general approach would work sufficiently well. Regards, Philip
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