OpenIM and IMFreedom

Few months ago I wrote a bug report on the freedesktop.org bugzilla to ask for means to start a new project. The goal of that project, called “OpenIM” was to gather effort on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols. In the bug thread and on the pidgin mailing list, a discussion started to determine if freedesktop was the right place to host that kind of project (i.e. support reverse engineering and documentation of proprietary protocols) and a lot of people joined it, agreeing that such an effort was needed, regarding the poor and all over the place documentation parcels (at least referring to the MSN protocol ones). Those people included valuable guys from amsn, pidgin, pymsn, jabber, and other worthy individuals of the IM field.

Instead of freedesktop, the pidgin guys proposed to host the initiative on IMFreedom, a Foundation they did setup as a façade when they got justice problems with AOL. We all agreed that using IMFreedom for OpenIM would make more sense. That gave birth to a brand new wiki to collect our efforts.

Be interested, sweat, contribute!

FOSDEM and other cool stuff

So, lots of good things are happening to me these times. Well, I guess.

Studies are soon-to-be-finished and I actually began my final year internship that ends in June, when I’ll graduate. For one week now, I have been a trainee at Nokia, Helsinki (Finland). This is quite a big move for me, since I never really left France until now. I’m really enjoying that new environment, this is challenging to adapt, on a personal side. I’m working in the OSSO Multimedia team at Nokia and I got surprised of how my arrival went well, people are really cool and I’m enjoying to be there, that’s a great opportunity to learn from them and actually discover the “big company” world, even using open source technologies. I’m sure that experience will bring me a lot and I’m not waiting for less on that.

So it’s Sunday night and I’m in Brussels (Belgium), spending some cool time with friends in the hotel hall. That was my first FOSDEM and I enjoyed it. Well, the classic thing about FOSDEM is to say that it was too short, and it was, but I can add my very own observations as well. The top advantage of such conferences is to gather and share some words with cool and respected people that you already know, like the Collabora crew and the GNOME community or meet with guys you aspire to share with, like the Vala developers. It’s also still refreshing to spend time with friends that are usually just too far away from you. FOSDEM is just maybe too subject-wide and not a lot of the talks grabbed my attention. As a comparison, GUADEC talks were a far lot more oriented to my fields of interest.

That conference was also the opportunity for Ali and I to share a bit about the project we’re working on, People. People is an unified address book management framework and I’ll blog about it very soon.

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Helsinki and try to begin well my second week there. The real difficult thing is to keep myself alive (i.e. feeding and basic other things like that) but I enjoy the freedom I have there and all the free time I can use (to hack a lot on People, eventually).