Before the jessie release, I started a thread about the default softphone in Debian[1]
Nothing really changed, the thread appeared to fizzle out with comments from more than one person that Debian would ship whatever was recommended by the desktop maintainers / GNOME upstream[2] GNOME upstream have subsequently made statements that the default softphone they provide is not maintained and may even be dropped[3] That third email also suggests that the GNOME philosophy is not quite the same as the Debian philosophy: "popular chat protocols are mostly closed nowadays, meaning that having a built-in chat client potentially isn't as important as it used to be." Going forward, a) is this consistent with Debian's philosophy, or do we value having the choice of using a free and open softphone? b) if the answer to that is "yes", then should stretch continue to rely on Empathy, or should we open it up to competition, giving all the other softphone developers an opportunity to be installed by default? There is more than one way forward though, for example, the telepathy-resiprocate project[4] may make Empathy work better with SIP and I will ask the developers of Ring, which is a peer-to-peer protocol, if they would consider making a Telepathy connection manager too, then it could be used from Empathy. On the other hand, if Empathy is going away, then such initiatives may be a waste of time. Regards, Daniel 1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/03/msg00595.html 2. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/03/msg00638.html 3. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2015-April/msg00050.html 4. http://danielpocock.com/enterprise-grade-sip-coming-to-telepathy 5. http://ring.cx
