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by scrollaway 4078 days ago
Honest question: Do you think Hangouts will eventually be open sourced?

It's really messed up that all our non-xmpp (a massive majority) messaging goes over nonstandard protocols. All our daily communications are behind walled gardens; one of the sorriest states in tech today.

Hangouts going open source is one of the few ways this could change in a reasonable time frame.
2 comments
StavrosK 4078 days ago
Why would it be? They had federation on, but shut it down. It's getting less open, not more.
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scrollaway 4078 days ago
Didn't say I was hopeful. But it is in line with "innovate first, then offer for standardization".
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cpeterso 4078 days ago
Plus Hangouts launched with an NPAPI plugin that supported Firefox and IE, but now Hangouts is a Chrome-only extension:

http://www.google.com/hangouts/

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magicalist 4078 days ago
> Plus Hangouts launched with an NPAPI plugin that supported Firefox and IE, but now Hangouts is a Chrome-only extension

huh? Not to further derail this thread into irrelevant topics, but open up gmail in Firefox. If you aren't still holding on to the old google chat, that's hangouts right there. It takes like 2 seconds to verify this.

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higherpurpose 4078 days ago
I think there's a higher chance Google would adopt end-to-end encryption for its texts, voice and video calls than making it open source.

In other words: very unlikely.

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