MPOP for Yahoo! Messenger

[Mark Doliner]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:22 PM, John Bailey <rekkanoryo at rekkanoryo.org> wrote:
> On 12/21/2010 05:16 PM, Jonathan Tsai wrote:
>> I'm not sure if the APIs are officially released yet, but my friend who
>> works on the Messenger team says that if they are, they would be on YDN
>> <http://developer.yahoo.com/messenger/>
>
> We don't use the SDK--it's entirely useless to us, and it seems to be designed
> in a server-centric model, anyway.  Additionally, there's some crap in the terms
> about not exceeding 5,000 daily unique users which we could never hope to comply
> with and the licensing terms are incompatible with the GPL.  In essence, we
> could never use it, nor can I conceive of a reason why we'd want to.

<unimportant rant>
The various major IM companies tend to try to create easier-to-use
APIs for developers.  These tend to have more limited functionality
than the APIs used by the official clients.  And they tend to use a
separate tier of servers which tends to be less well-maintained than
the servers used by the official clients.

>From my point of view as a third-party IM client developer: I really
wish the various major IM companies would stop trying to coddle third
party developers and just release public documentation for their IM
networks.  We're pretty smart and quite capable.  We want to use the
same, reliable IM servers as everyone else.  And we want access to the
same functionality as the official clients.  There's no need to create
a lighter-weight API or bother maintaining separate servers.

But yeah, I understand that it might be hard for a company to justify that.
</unimportant rant>

>> Disclaimer: I am employed by Yahoo!, but I do not work on the Messenger
>> team. I am interested in working on an MPOP project for Pidgin purely as
>> a personal project from a user perspective and to give back to the
>> open-source community; my words, ideas, and views are my own, and do not
>> represent that of my company.
>
> You may wish to reconsider trying to contribute if you're a Yahoo employee.
> Past experience says that Yahoo employees may not contribute Yahoo-related code
> to Pidgin, Finch, or libpurple.

To be clear... we have no problem with Yahoo employees contributing to
Pidgin.  However, you must be absolutely sure that your employer is ok
with your contribution.  Copyright could remain in your name, or
Yahoo, or IM Freedom, Inc.  The license would need to be GPL.

--Mark