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by zanny 4740 days ago
If you want to carry on the analogy, Google has a debit card that only works at Google and unlike Walmart it won't accept competitors coupons and all the stuff sold in store isn't sold anywhere else. You also can't take it apart, and only people with Google debit cards can see any of it when it leaves the store.

Hangouts is becoming a nightmare of a proprietary locked in mess that is destroying decades of progress in FOSS space towards open standards for communication. They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk, and they are now killing VNC. They may not have played nice together, and they may be painfully outdated, but it isn't an excuse to take your toys from the community sandbox, go home, and build yourself a space rocket in your back yard and fence it off, because very few people will pay to get in your back yard and will stay in the sandbox with Tonka Trucks.
3 comments
simoncion 4740 days ago
"They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk..."

As of two or three weeks ago, the Hangouts videoconferencing code used WebRTC, Jingle, and a variety of video and audio codecs (among which one could find Opus.).

If you run the software on a *nix system, you can verify my claims by checking the contents of /tmp/gtalkplugin.log while you're in a video call with someone. Note that that file seems to be flushed to disk at irregular intervals, and that it is removed after the call is terminated.

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zanny 4740 days ago
My point is more even if they continue to use Jingle on the backend they defeat the point of Jabber by putting the auth servers in a proprietary backend. The whole point of XMPP was to stop making messaging / communication formats that don't play in the same sandbox and can't interopt. I can't contact someone in a hangout (via chat or voice) with anything but a hangout.
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nknighthb 4740 days ago
> and they are now killing VNC

Um, no. This feature substitutes for one small VNC use case -- a use case already largely controlled by commercial products like TeamViewer and Copilot anyway.

VNC has much broader uses than this.

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codereflection 4740 days ago
Good points.. however I don't thing they're killing off VNC. VNC, I believe, has a pretty narrow user base. Google's addition of remote desktop control will be doing more harm to small companies and their apps like FogCreek's Copilot.
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