On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Daniel Pocock <dan...@pocock.pro> wrote:
> On 28/04/16 20:05, Dominik George wrote: > >> *You* should care. If you don't have users, you won't get new > >> contributors while old ones will slowly leave too and the project > >> just dies. Simple as that. > >> > >> Just look at KDE Telepathy, probably one of the biggest Telepathy > >> clients out there. We've had about 10 everyday developers 5 years ago, > >> we have two in a _month_ now. And we do have quite an awesome > >> feature set, yet our users are also declining. Why? Because we don't > >> support $protocol (and also because mobile). > > AFAIAC, I do not use Telepathy a lot because its XMPP support is stale > and broken. > > > > I'd rather have two developers fix that than 10 devs of which 9 work on > non-free protocols. > > Personally, I believe there is a way forward. > > Part of the problem is technical (e.g. fixing or replacing > telepathy-gabble, as discussed in the other thread). There are people > willing to do bits of this work and there are ways to get things funded > if we really need to. > > Part of it is about cooperation - there are various pieces of work that > I've done that nobody is using because they got stuck in some other > organization. As an example, I've packaged three TURN servers for > Debian/Ubuntu and one for Fedora, so people can relay across NAT > boundaries, just like the Google ICE/TURN servers. I also offered the > package for OpenWRT but after 3 years they still haven't accept it, it > is stuck in their queue. That is sad, because many people have a real > IP address on their router and that is where the TURN server needs to > listen. > > Finally, there is leadership. When people go to their doctor, they > usually don't ask something like "can you recommend a brand of > cigarette" but they come to an IT professional and ask do we prefer > Skype or Viber or Whatsapp. We need to be able to reply with the same > confidence as a doctor telling his patient smoking kills. Now just > imagine if the doctor says that and then on the weekend the patient sees > the doctor smoking a cigar in the local casino. What happens to the > doctor's credibility? > Sorry, that's just not how it works. In the long history of KDE Telepathy, I don't remember a single user ever asking _us_ what do _we_ prefer. I understand that's how we want it to play out, but irl it just doesn't. People are where their friends are, that's a history-proven fact. > As I've mentioned before, I believe Telepathy has a big role to play > because it allows multiple protocols to be installed by default on Linux > desktops like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. That is much better than > having different clients for each protocol. Big things have happened on > the server side (the development and widespread packaging of TURN > servers) and big things are in the pipeline with new connection managers > for reSIProcate, Ring.cx, Tox and Matrix.org. Despite our differences > and our frustrations, if we can bring all these things together as a > team we can make quite an impact. > KDE Telepathy is ready for that. We have audio/video calls client as well as group chats implementation of sorts, so if people can actually pull this together, we are ready to be the client for it. Cheers -- Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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