[OTR-users] otr support in gajim?

[Ananda Samaddar]

Jonathan Schleifer wrote:

> 
> Actually, we don't think so. OTR is mostly used in legacy networks (this 
> is how the XMPP world calls ICQ, MSN etc.) which will sooner or later 
> fade away, thus it's better to use what is standarized by the XSF and 
> promote that instead of embracing a workaround/hack. 

I don't think MSN, AIM, or YM are going anywhere quite yet. Labelling
OTR as a 'hack' or a 'workaround' is somewhat insulting to OTR's
creators and developers in my opinion.  What exactly do you mean by this
as well?  OTR is to my knowledge a pretty good method of communicating
securely over an unsecure channel and uses a similar design philosophy
to SSH.  The protocol seems to have been well thought out and documented
and was created by respected cryptographers.  Is PGP a hack as well too?
  It fulfils a similar role to OTR with respect to e-mail.  What about SSH?


> The only reason why 
> one would want OTR in Gajim is for using transports. But when you can 
> successfully migrate someone to a client that supports OTR, it shouldn't 
> be a problem to migrate that user to XMPP as well, as most of the 
> clients that support OTR also support XMPP.

Not much cop when most of your or their friends aren't on XMPP.
Proprietary IM protocols are a fact of internet life, even though I wish
they weren't.

> Sure, ESessions isn't widespreaed, and it will never be, as it's 
> deferred. But c2c TLS will definitely come and will very quickly appear 
> in every XMPP client, as it's easy to implement. It's far better for 
> Gajim to invest resources into that than into OTR, because all 
> developers of major clients already agreed on standards at xmpp.org to 
> implement it once it's finished.
> Plus, there's still the unsupported OTR branch which you can use.
> 

I've been in contact with Kjell Braden who does the work on the OTR
branch.  He is hoping to get his code merged back into the main branch
when Gajim's plugin system and libotr4 is implemented.  I hope Gajim's
developers see sense and allow this merge.  As far as resources are
concerned surely Kjell will the be the one devoting development time to
OTR in Gajim and not the main developers?

Ananda