Ekiga & Pidgin merge?

[Oliver Schinagl]

Hello all,

first off, Ekiga and Pidgin are great products. They works quite well in
their own domain.

I was wondering, with projects forking left and right, and about a
hundred several programs/projects doing the same, why wouldn't pidgin
and ekiga concider a merge? If not merge of apps, a merge of resources?

I know Pidgin is working on libjingle to be used with Pidgin to supply
VoiP/Gtalk functionality, but where is the video part? Or more
specifically, why would you wanna produce everything in duality?

The way I see it, with libpurple/libjingle you could technically have
any front end client imagineable, focus on the audio/video portion, or
focus on the chat portion, or have it all.
I won't say that OSS projects should try to keep up or what not with
commercial products (skype or MSN for example) but it would be kinda
neat if there was an OSS application that was ahead of the others (think
compiz/XGL sorta).

Just know, that the last thing I wish to accomplish with this e-mail is
to hit anybody against the shins, nor hurt anybody's feelings of course.
But if a discussion would start from this, and maybe a merge at the end,
why not?

Thanks for listening/reading anyway,

Oliver