Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 12:36 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On 10/10/11 10:39, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > On jue, 2011-10-06 at 14:30 -0400, Ken VanDine wrote:
> >> Sorry, not trying to sound harsh here but I couldn't find a better way
> >> to say this.
> >>
> >> Basically you are saying that GOA isn't really an open technology to
> >> help consolidate user's online accounts, it is only to help consolidate
> >> accounts for blessed GNOME apps?  This doesn't really help users in the
> >> big picture, but I guess the design team makes those decisions.
> >>
> > GOA already has support for Twitter and Facebook accounts, they are just
> > disabled in the build by default because of the legal issues David
> > mentions.
> >
> > In fact, I asked about enabling them by default recently, and David
> > explained the distributing-the-keys problem, which needs to be solved.
> > So, there's nothing to do with designers, it's just a legal issue.
> >
> > Out of curiosity, what keys does gwibber use? does it distribute them?
> 
> Disclaimer: I am not savy to all the details here.
> 
> With Ubuntu's approach in their last distribution to FaceBook/Twitter 
> (i.e. asking the user to accept the terms themselves during set up), 
> isn't that accepting the "key" here? Or is this some sort of SDK key?

You need a per-app API key to be able to use the APIs. The terms of
service for apps generally require this key to be "hidden" which (appart
from being silly, the code need to be able to read the key, so how
hidden can it be?) means that this is not possible for an open source
application to fullfill the service agreement.

Additionally, many web services have terms of services for apps that are
pretty bad. Twitter in particular recently upgraded theirs to be very
harsh on 3rd party clients:
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2011/03/twitter-tells-third-party-devs-to-stop-making-twitter-client-apps.ars

For instance, look at:
https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines
If you don't follow that exactly they can retract your key and break
your app...