Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Google to drop XMPP entirely

[David Loyall]

> > I believe, it would be generally
> > better for them to stop depending on
> > Google services step by step.
> Absolutely, that's the way forward.

Yes.

FWIW, I suspect that there are engineers inside big G that agree.  (After all, don't you think that many of them were free software supporters (or at least open-source supporters) before they started working there?)

Google knows what percentage of Talk traffic came from external XMPP and what percentage came from gmail.  Surely they also know that their recent action will cause at least a small surge in global XMPP usage and a corresponding (small) drop in G Talk usage.

I compare this Google XMPP situation with the situation that caused the founder of identi.ca to say at LibrePlanet 2013 that he wishes more people were using federated StatusNet services, rather than all piling on the reference implementation.

Google could regain some trust from the community by releasing their XMPP stuff as free software.  (If they're not using it, why not, right?)  It wouldn't surprise me if that goal is already on their to-do list, as a low-priority.  (If they are anything like other organizations, they won't ever do any low priority task unless it gets promoted to medium priority, for example, due to user pressure.)

Cheers,
--Dave