[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Niklas Andersson]

Hi,

  I am heading a project where we bring MS Lync-functionality to Pidgin 
by contributing to a series of project, making everything Open Source as 
we go. This far we have contributed to SIPE, Pidgin/libpurple, 
Farstream, Gstreamer, FreeRDP and libnice. Everything is forked on 
Github [1] and patches are sent upstream.

  I think a lot of what we have done could be applicable to Telepathy, 
XMPP and other IM-clients as well. We are particularly proud of the 
Desktop Screen Sharing feature that makes it possible to do 
cross-platform screen sharing (with take/give control) using the 
RDP-protocol. It is Enterprise Quality. We have also implemented support 
for File Transfer, Enterprise Voice (both encrypted with SRTP, and 
unencrypted), and we are working on h264-video.

  Also, as Daniel points out, one of the big problems is NAT/Proxy 
traversals, This is why we have contributed to libnice with some 
TURN/ICE specs. We still have problems we think are related to bandwidth 
throttling we need to sort out... In the end neither XMPP nor SIP is 
responsible for the voice quality per se, as they are mostly used for 
setting up the connection between the different parties. (and in some 
cases relaying the datastream).

Our main repository is Sipe [2] on github. Our main developer keeps a 
tab on all recent events in his Daily-blurbs [3].

I would love to see as much of our work spill over into XMPP and 
Telepathy as possible. Feel free to look at what we are doing, use the 
bits if you can, or if you need any more information just ask.

[1] https://github.com/tieto
[2] https://github.com/tieto/sipe
[3] https://github.com/tieto/sipe/wiki/Daily-blurbs

Best regards,
Niklas


On 25/04/16 16:00, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> On 25 April 2016 15:41:20 CEST, Dominik George <nik at naturalnet.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> With my GNOME hat on, we are not spending much effort on our instant
>>> messaging features. For a free software desktop, XMPP was by far the
>>> most useful and mature part of Telepathy. Google, Facebook and
>>> Microsoft has either moved away from XMPP or deprecated it, while
>>> Telegram and Whatsapp use something different.
>> WhatsApp uses XMPP. It is slightly modified to force people to use the
>> official client, but it is XMPP.
>>
>>> None of the XMPP-based free VoIP options ever worked reliably. They
>>> were spotty at best.
>> That was years ago. Look at Jitsi, the Jitsi video bridge and Jitsi
>> Meet.
>>
>> The main issue with XMPP-based VoIP is client implementations.
>> XMPP-VoIP never
>> worked reliably in Telepathy because Telepathy's implementation of
>> XMPP-VoIP
>> is horrible.
>>
>> I don't mean to be rude, and I think the Telepathy developers sure do a
>> good
>> job, but please do not blame it on XMPP itself.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, the problems faced in this area are an example of fragmentation in the free software community.  There are people doing great things with the Linux desktop and there are people doing great things with free, open source VoIP (e.g. the WebRTC stacks in Firefox and Chrome are very effective at NAT traversal), we need to reach a little further to join the dots an get all these things together.
>
>>> Given how hard it is to support any of the popular instant messaging
>>> networks, a free software IM stack looks increasingly pointless.
>> Maybe
>>> someone will come up with a mature Telegram implementation ...
>>
>> Given the above, please all stop whining and start get Telepathy back
>> on
>> track, thus bringing XMPP forward by providing another well-working
>> client,
>> instead of bringing support for proprietary protocols forward!
>>
> How about having Ring, Tox and Matrix connection managers?
>
> https://project.freertc.org/projects/telepathy/issues?set_filter=1
>
>
>
>