OpenIM freedesktop project

[Youness Alaoui]

Hi All,

I'm KaKaRoTo, developer and project manager of the aMSN project (the best IM client ever, I know.. :p)
I'm writing to you guys in order to suggest something to you. We're trying (the pymsn developer and myself) to get a new project created in 
freedesktop.org. 
The idea is simple, a single place in which we would gather all the effort on reverse engineering and on documenting the known IM protocols. 
As many of you probably know, the documentation for each protocol is scattered around many websites, and if we want to implement a client or library 
for a closed prototocol (like MSN) we would need a lot of googling and reading many different documentation, each giving us a little bit of info on 
the protocol.. and eventually, we'll end up doing a lot of reverse engineering ourselves to complete the lack of documentation.
This is mainly what happened with aMSN, in order to implement the protocol features, we had to do most of the reverse engineering ourselves, and 
there's nothing to document what we found (although I've helped enhance some of the msnpiki website, not everything has been put in there).

So the OpenIM initiative will probably benefit us all by sharing a common place for all of our knowledge on those closed (and open) IM protocols. 
I'm willing to write most of the MSN protocol information. aMSN uses the MSNP12 version of the protocol, but I'm working with the pymsn developers 
on reverse engineering and documenting the MSNP15 version.

So here's the thing, freedesktop admin requires us to gather as many people as possible in order to get the project created, so I hope many of you 
will be willing to help.
If any of you is interested in this project, please write a comment in the bugzilla page for this project creation request in order to convince the 
freedesktop.org admins to create the project.
If you want to learn more about the idea, you can read the info already posted in the bug report, or email me for any additional info.

Bugzilla link : https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12237

Thanks for reading,
KaKaRoTo