On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 17:26:11 +0200 Dominik George <n...@naturalnet.de> wrote:
> Hi, > > >You can. I can. Daniel Pocock can. That's 3 of us. > > > >Now ask yourself - who are we making this software for? For us 3? > >Or for the masses out there, hoping that maybe they will see value > >in using free/open source? > > > >Without users, any project is effectively dead. So yes, I will > >struggle even for the sake of having few more users. > > maybe stop thinking about Telepathy as a stand-alone tool. I think we > should see free communication as a whole. Telepathy should be part of > that and bring ideals forward by being a good frontend. > > There is no benefit for anyone in pulling users of other messengers > over to telepathy: > > - Users will be using a product that will always be worse than the > original, because supporting all of the proprietary stuff is close to > impossible and undocumented things will keep changing. Things will > keep breaking. For Skype, it's even worse. There is no way for > supporting Skype except RPCing the original client - why should > someone install original Skype, then go and use Telepathy as a > frontend? None of this makes any sense, and Telepathy will take > damage because people believe it supports something, then find out > it's crap. *People leaving after a bad experience is much worse than > people not coming in the first place!* Totally agreed. For that reason I would rather invest some time into making XMPP work better with Telepathy. Supporting more XEPs. I am quite new to this mailing list but recently tried to get my feet wet: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2016-April/006805.html > - Developers will have to support stuff they cannot support because > there is nothing to rely on. Users will be complaining, and devs will > answer „I don't know, something broke in $protocol“ - users will take > that as finger-pointing and lose trust in Telepathy and free software > in general. > > This is not only true for Telepathy. It is true for all projects that > strive to be a painless drop-in replacement for everyone. Look at > Ubuntu - started out as a user-friendly Linux Desktop for Windows > users, now it is an unusable software museum and harder to get > running than any recent Debian release. > > I see no point in running for market share - if you pay close > attention to this discussion, it becomes obvious that the only gain > for Telepathy would be market share among chat clients. That somehow > contradicts the ideals of an open community. Why do you bother if > Pidgin has twice as many users? Who actually cares? > > And it is that kind of competitive thinking that keeps free > communication and a free network trapped in stone age - if all of us > got together and get free-rtc backends, frontends *and* marketing up > and running instead of arguing about how to increase client market > share, there would indeed be a realistic chance of getting people to > use it. > > Let's get the message out, bring more clients into good shape for > modern XMPP, find a sponsor and advertise it just as TPTB do. > > Sounds like some childish dream that won't work out? Sure, I pitty > you if a dream is not a good starting point for you anymore. If you > don't try, but wave a white flag in front of Facebook Inc. by > supporting their stuff as a last resort to gain market share, *then* > you will soon be lost in irrelevance. Well said. _______________________________________________ telepathy mailing list telepathy@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/telepathy
