[Dev] Remove the Facebook support for Parabola software

[Luke T. Shumaker]

At Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:54:44 +0200,
Guest One wrote:
> Reading this http://www.fsf.org/facebook and this
> http://stallman.org/facebook.html i have a question for you:
> should Parabola remove the Facebook support from applications like Pidgin,
> Empathy, Gwibber and from all the others?
> maybe should be a good policy.

1. I'm not very familiar with Facebook, or the various chat programs;
   but AFAIK Pidgin/libpurple's Facebook "support" is just XMPP with a
   default domain of chat.facebook.com or whatever. 
2. We certainly do not encourage the use of Facebook or other
   non-autonomous network services, but explicitly *removing* support
   for them is something that we have discussed before, and rejected.
3. Removing support for these non-autonomous network services in all
   of the various programs would be beyond the resources we have
   available.
4. Availability of reverse engineered APIs in programs has proven to
   be a boon for autonomous network services.  StatusNet benefited
   significantly by having a Twitter-compatible API, and the
   availability of free Twitter clients.
5. As fauno said, if a user wants to chat with people on Facebook,
   removing support only encourages them to fall into the Javascript
   trap.
6. Again, Facebook chat is just XMPP, an open protocol.
7. What, are we going to start policing what XMPP servers people
   connect to?  Whitelist the FSF's, and blacklist Facebook's?

Elsewhere in the thread, someone mentioned Skype. We do remove Skype
support/references because there are no free Skype clients.

Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker