[Pidgin] #34: Voice/video support

[Pidgin]

#34: Voice/video support
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  Reporter:  MarkDoliner  |       Owner:  seanegan
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  assigned
  Priority:  minor        |   Milestone:          
 Component:  libpurple    |     Version:          
Resolution:               |    Keywords:          
   Pending:  0            |  
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Comment (by star_dancer):

 There are people who care about pidgin, and that's why feature requests
 matter.  Open-source really isn't a "do this for me or I will use a
 different program" type of thing and it's juvenile and counter-productive
 to say things like that.  Many users requesting voice support are very
 serious and, over-all, happy users of Pidgin and appreciate the work and
 commitment of the developers.  However, when any project gets large
 enough, I do feel developers have some responsibility to listen to their
 users, I hope that aggressive posts on this trac do not cause the
 developers to lose that sense of responsibility.  It's embarrassing that
 there are people in the "community" that would post things like that here.

 Here is something new and hopefully constructive I have to ask (as a
 Pidgin user who desperately wants voice support, who has a programming
 background, and who has even tried to play with implementing it herself in
 the gaim-2 betas): As a code-contributer to open-source projects, I fully
 understand the response that runs along the lines of "we are focusing on
 other things, but you can code it yourself and we will implement it" and I
 have done that with projects in the past.  However, asking someone who may
 not be familiar with the Pidgin code base to implement a major change is a
 huge thing to ask, especially if it involves gui/core separation and core
 modularization of the entire project and a number of crazy huge structural
 decisions.

 Is it possible that Pidgin developers could break the large task of voice
 support into a series of smaller, well-defined programming tasks that
 could be taken on individually by more casual developers?  Especially if
 implementing voice support requires major structural decisions.  This
 would prevent well-meaning developers from wasting time and would increase
 the number of people that would be capable of helping you out. It may also
 be that individual, smaller tasks working toward voice support are
 beneficial to the program in other ways or allow for other types of
 enhancements.

 Finally, remember that a percentage of your developer base comes from your
 user base.  Functional voice support even for Google and MSN would greatly
 enhance your user and hence, your developer pool.  Furthermore, I think
 Pidgin holds the niche for a clean, gnome-based, IM client (kudos for
 that!) and that is why your user base is so large.  However, I truly feel
 that if you had a gnome-based competitor with voice and/or video, you
 would lose that user base very rapidly.  I doubt Pidgin's goal is to be
 popular, however, a program without users dies pretty quickly.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/34#comment:39>
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