Channeling user's attention and funds to help us implement A/V for Pidgin & Adium

[Eric Richie]

I think my biggest concern would be that users might view it as an
'ad'.  It is, but also isn't.  I just think it could be a tricky
situation.  I know that with Adium we've promised our users that we
will never become adware and I wouldn't want to give the impression
that we are somehow going down that route.  That isn't to say that I
disagree with the idea though.  I just feel that implementation could
be tricky.

-Eric

P.S. Shouldn't the expected behavior be that the capabilities are
checked before the attempt is even made and if the client doesn't
support audio/video/foo it won't even try?

2008/10/17 Richard Laager <rlaager at wiktel.com>:
> Now that the mailing list is back up, I thought I'd forward this along.
>
> The idea is certainly an interesting one. The biggest downside that I
> can see is that this makes the FOSS Factory project at least somewhat
> "official" from our side, which seems to conflict with the idea of IM
> Freedom taking donations. That said, since we STILL don't have an IM
> Freedom donation page up, perhaps we should abandon that idea?
>
> Richard
>
> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 11:37 -0400, Abdullah Bakhach wrote:
>> Hi you guys,
>>
>> I'm writing this email to both teams that are working on implementing
>> a/v to Pidgin and Adium since it talks about a subject of mutual
>> interest, the subject is how can get the community involved in helping
>> us get this job done.
>>
>> I have been testing with both clients across all three OS platforms
>> (Win Linux and Mac) with a variety of IM clients (yahoo msn google
>> etc) and I noticed that whenever someone tries to initiate an audio
>> for video chat session with me when I'm using Pidgin or Adium, nothing
>> happens.  No error message is displayed, in fact nothing happens at
>> all.  The other party just sees a message that looks like "attempting
>> to initiate chat session" and just keeps on waiting.
>>
>> The only thing mentioned about the subject is a note in Adium's help
>> documentation.. if someone searches for audio or video help this
>> message is displayed
>>
>> Adium currently does not support Audio Chatting or Video Conferencing.
>> Adium's developers understand that these are highly demanded additions
>> to Adium and may incorporate these at some point in the future.
>>
>> What I'm suggesting here is that a patch gets implemented on both
>> clients that directs users at the right times (ie when someone
>> attempts to A/V chat with them, or when they are attempting to
>> initiate an A/V session themselves, search for it in help etc) to the
>> corresponding projects on FOSS Factory.  The message should say
>> something like: this project is under development, click here to
>> support it by donations or by code (that's the most basic form, to
>> make it even better the widget could actually display how much money
>> is being donated, how many subprojects there are how many submissions
>> etc etc) This kind of contextualized donation would be IMHO a lot more
>> attractive to donors than a simple "donate now" button on your
>> homepages.
>>
>> Please give me your thoughts on the idea.  I think if implemented this
>> widget could bring a lot of life to the project and provide a good
>> example to follow for other features in Pidgin and Gaim and other open
>> source projects in general.
>>
>> Looking forward to your feedback.
>>
>>
>> Abdullah Bakhach
>> FOSS Factory
>> President & co-founder
>> www.fossfactory.org/abdullah
>> 519.505.0602
>>
>>
>>
>
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