Empathy users can look forward to native MSN XMPP in the next release of the popular chat app.
The feature comes days after Microsoft announced connection to their millions-strong MSN messaging service via the popular open XMPP standard.
GNOME developer Xavier Claessens’, in blogging about the change, revealed more on the current status: –
Thanks to the advice of a Microsoft developer, I even fixed the legal issue that prevented us to enable this by default.
All patches got merged and released into empathy (>=3.3.2), telepathy-gabble (>= 0.15.0), and gnome-online-accounts(>=3.3.0).
MSN via XMPP (Jabber) now working and legal issues resolved, Empathy to officially rock for MSN users.
Great – When Can I Use It?
The feature should be available to use ‘out of the box’ in Ubuntu 12.04.
Eager Ubuntu 11.10 users are likely to find a set of backported packages available to install via a PPA within the coming weeks. We’ll let you know as soon as possible.
In the mean time, if you’re super desperate, you can compile the latest Empathy, telepathy-gabble and gnome-online-accounts from Git.
Thanks to David Nielsen