Re: Google Hangouts support

[Simon McVittie <smcv collabora com>]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2017 at 08:52:55 -0700, Diane Trout wrote:
> > The general migration of user-base from open protocols (XMPP, SIP)
> > to proprietary protocols with no good open-source implementation, but
> > broad enough browser support that nobody has a very compelling reason
> > to do the reverse-engineering and write one (Hangouts, Facebook Chat)
> > is a large part of why Telepathy is on the way out.
>
> I thought the biggest reason Telepathy stalled was Nokia stopped
> funding the work at Collabora after they were acquired by Microsoft,
> and there weren't enough non-Collabora people involved to keep the
> project healthy.

We continued to develop Telepathy for a while after Nokia lost interest,
and if other clients had been more interested in it, perhaps we still
would be; but you can see how well that went. I don't think open source
IM was considered very appealing after Google Talk stopped being relevant
and the very-much-closed Skype was the biggest player.

> Personally I think that Telepathy's architecture of putting the
> connection manager in a separate process is a good design choice.

This can be argued both ways. It's robust and enables connection
sharing; it also makes it frustratingly slow and expensive (measured
in either money or volunteer time) to add new features, which makes it
rather unappealing to fund (and presumably often not very appealing for
contributors either, although I'm pleased to here there's still some
community around it).

    smcv