Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com> wrote:
> On 10/06/2011 07:40 PM, David Zeuthen wrote:
>>
>> II. To avoid user confusion we only want the major online services in GOA.
>>     Support for more specialized protocols/services should happen in each
>>     separate app - that's why, for example, that Empathy still has a
>> preferences
>>     menu so you can add support for e.g. ICQ, Zephyr and other fringe chat
>>     services and protocols. And that's also why you still have support in
>>     Evolution for manually adding IMAP/SMTP servers.
>
> What about free (or not free) services you can install on your own box but
> would still provide services for many different programs?
>
> I'm thinking about owncloud, for instance, which provides document storage,
> calendar, bookmarks, etc.
>
> Sure this is not a "well known" service, but yet I think many would like to
> be able to add such services, due to our natural love of freedom and not
> promoting big companies without alternatives.

I agree it would be nice if the free software community could come up
with a credible alternative to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft's Live to
name just three. And I definitely think if such a credible alternative
were to surface we should definitely support it in GNOME along the
same lines of the non-free ones, perhaps even giving it special
treatment because its free.

Whether OwnCloud specifically is this project remains to be seen - but see

 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660573

for the request to add OwnCloud support to GOA (the reason I haven't
replied to that bug yet is that I want to get the guidelines I gave
upthread into the goa docs).

    David