[OTR-users] Support for Telepathy/Empathy

[Paul Wouters]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>> Someone from the Telepathy team would need to take the lead on this.
>
> FYI— The next revision of Fedora is pushing users to Empathy rather
> than pidgin. I believe ubuntu is doing this as well.
>
> The Empathy developers describe OTR as "Broken by design" because it
> is not protocol integrated and mock the people who request it:
> http://resiak.livejournal.com/60614.html  So it seems that OTR support
> is never going to happen there.

Yes, they even personally blew an approved Google Summer of Code project
for OTR with Telepathy/Empathy out of the water. They basically only do
jabber and ssl, and have absolutely no clue whatsoever what it means
to have secure communication without digital signatures and plausible
deniability.

The whole point with OTR is being protocol-agnostic. It's not something
they can think about. They're too deep down in their RFC's and jabber code
to realise jabber is about 1% of the IM community out there in real life,
and so a "protocol hack" like OTR is the only thing that is going to work
to talk to your real life friends and family that are not CS PHD students.

There are many people who will never use their software. Not just because
of OTR, but also because they seem to think that they can convince everyone
to move away from MSN and AIM and Skype and Facebook IM, and join the Jabber
revolution. Their support for non-jabber is very minimalistic. They do not
listen or respect to the requirements of the community and therefor have
marginalised themselves.

I have no hope that Telepathy will ever get a serious userbase, even if
Fedora was so stupid as to make it their default IM client.

There. I feel much better now.

Paul