Unless the deveopment is done outside of US. Because in that case you can use the letter to wipe your, let's say tears of joy and carry on writing the project. Unless, ofcourse you are planning to visit US any time in the future.

Like it or not, but it's not a silver bullet. There is a lot of people who are disconent with Facebook as IM. Believe it or not, but around here people use Skype, WhatsApp and XMPP for IMs, facebook being the last place you'd think to reach a person.

As much as you (and Facebook execs) 'd like Facebook to be "one size fits all" - it's far from that.

Tell any decent IT security manager that you would like to use facebook as company IM and watch him laugh his behind off.

The encryption you are talking about is client-to-server, the encryption the article is talking about is server-to-server. If both are on, the only parties who know about the content of chats is:
1 You
2 Whoever you are messaging
3 Server

To drop the server from the list, you will need end-to-end encryption. Like OTR or GPG.

Well, google sued CM to stop them distributing GPlay. And you can't sell any device with GPlay on it, if Google doesn't give OK for that and you don't negotiate some secret terms and pass their "certification".

And yes - Google Play Store is NOT included in AOSP and doesn't ship with AOSP or any derivatives, unless manufacturer passed the certifications, details of which are discussed on a per-case basis with Google and are subject to NDA.

>> They currently are behind development of the most popular (And open source!) mobile OS out there,

And they are quietly dragging all the open source parts into closed source framework called Google Services, trying to create a vendor lock-in for the apps, so that it's impossible to run software on AOSP without Google Services Framework, which is closed source and completely controled by google. Messaging app is gone (hangouts to the rescue), so is Gallery (hello Google+ Photos, yuck) and a lot of other, smaller things are all being sucked into closed source with their open source variants being left behind and abandoned.

>> the most popular (and "mostly" open source) desktop browser out there

_mostly_ open source. Do you even listen to yourself? Chrome has a fair share of closed source code with important functionality. Chromium is impaired compared to Chrome in terms of functionality.

>> having given very solid reasons for why they dont do security theatre with their Chrome password store

You mean encrypting user passwords with user key and allowing to self-host open source synchronization servers, like firefox does is "theater" ?

>> Im not clear in what sense you could consider them to be "rotting".

In the sense that google stopped being on the forefront of open web and started trying to become the web. Because it's easier to earn money this way. And in the short run, you might even score a nice bonus. As for the long run - who cares for the long run, when there is a nice cash bonus?

Universities, a lot of businesses, non-profits, all use XMPP because it's pretty mush the only solution that doesn't make you give up your information and can host inhouse (without costing an arm and a leg and forcing you into a vendor lock-in).

Even if you give up and drop XMPP, you will still need to use Skype, Google, WhatsApp and whatnot (all of them, not just one), because my communication circle stretches across target audiences of all those messengers and there is no silver bullet (one ideal messenger that would satisfy all people) as sometimes people want completely different things and one messenger cannot satisfy all of them.

>> Anyway, I guess people like the comfort and convenience of walled gardens.

People like comfort and convenience. Corporations love walled gardens, because they can use vendor lock-in to try and leverage their userbase into bringing more people into the same trap.

Most people won't care who pays for the services they use until the information they provided will be used against them, or until they'll lose everything at a blink of an eye for violating some ToS, it'll be too late by then, but, well, some people only learn the hard way.

They did explain. You just didn't listen good enough. XMPP interoperability wouldn't let google force people into their services and would let people run third-party services and yet enjoy the luxury of communicating with those, who used Google as their one-stop-shop for all online needs. Clearly that had to be stopped. I'm expecting a similar move for GMail, only much swifter (those damn users are too used to the stupid idea of email being cross-server, not being locked-in).

That's BS. All this achieves is pushes you into the same zoo of IM clients that stretches from the 90-s. ICQ, Odigo, MSN, Gadu, Skype, XMPP and now all the mobile IMs are all dreaming of being The One. I'm so glad all this corporate "there can be only one and it should be us" broke out after email was standartized. Because right now, several decades from it's invention, we're still stuck with it. No matter how ugly or unsuitable for modern needs the protocol is and how many ugly hacks have been applied to it. Just because this is the only universal communication method. You can send a message and receiver will get it regardless of what mail service it uses.

Back in the day google's tech team though that something similar should be done for IM market and supported XMPP. But then, they decided that this product was too good, to let other people, who don't use google's services to use it to contact the ones already in the Google's web of services. "Everyone should get a google ID." And now hopes of other players are even dimmer than they ever were. Looks like my dream, where people from facebook, google, univercity network and some corporate IM system can get into one conference and chat is a pipe dream.

I don't care for internal protocols, features and such. I just want interoperability between servers. Let john@google.com message jane@facebook.com and any other server that has supported XMPP server. I worked great for email, by the hell do you try to introduce walled gardens and cause pain to your users?

XMPP is quite power hungry, keeping an open TCP connection, otherwise it's a good protocol, but Facebook has implemented it with quite a number of ugly bugs that can make it really hard to use a decent XMPP client.

Not a chat client. An instant messaging service with several million users. They are what gives it value, not the client or servers or anything else.

>> The lack of reasonable IO (keyboard)

You know, that IO stands for Input-Output, output is quite decent on mobile phones (for a chat), keyboards are flaky, but swipe-type ones are quite OK for operating with one hand while walking or standing.

>> privacy (all sms is logged)
>> and per-msg charges from providers makes it about the least desirable option.

You seem to think that all chats are SMS. Let me tell you about this wonderful thing, called internet, that has been used to send instant messages without charge for a couple of decades now (ICQ, Odigo, MSN, IRC). Using adequate encryption scheme you can even take back your privacy.

Yeah, because hiding that behaviour and pretending to be an adult is so much healthier. People should evolve, not blame the tools that let them show who they really are.

>> end-all-be-all messaging and communication platform

You mean like Skype, Viber, Line and not so long ago MSN and ICQ. FFS, just turn on the goddamn federation. I don't care for client-server protocol, but just let people from different networks talk to each other.

Well, luckily for MS, google never released source code for their proprietary apps. All in all I see this as a positive thing. Google has been tightening it's grip on android ecosystem, trying to absorb as much of basic APIs into it's proprietary GoogleServices as possible. Maybe this will force them to open up again at least a little bit.