How is MSNP "horrible", specifically? You've worked with it?
The main difference I see between MSNP and Skype is that much of MSNP could be figured out in a day just by sniffing packets, which is probably what lead to a proliferation of alternative clients and client libraries for it. The (deliberate?) complexity of Skype means that RE attempts are more difficult, so there are fewer people with the skills and inclination to do it. Hopefully there will be more focus on it now, but it's still a huge effort in comparison.
Personally, I'm not too fond of XMPP either; something more similar to IRC would be my preference. But all of that doesn't matter when almost everyone you know used/uses MSNP/Skype, and from experience it's very difficult to change that, so any progress toward an open-source Skype client will be great.
> How is MSNP "horrible", specifically? You've worked with it?
Yes. I'm sure you know yourself: It's very ugly at the low level, it barely supports the minimum feature set to call it an "instant messaging protocol", and let's please not forget that is is a closed, proprietary protocol regardless of how readable it is on the wire. Microsoft has full control over it and can decide at any moment to... well, for example, shut it down.
Not saying skype is better, just glad to see crappy proprietary tech die out.
"Microsoft has full control over it and can decide at any moment to... well, for example, shut it down."
Not if people decide to write their own server software for it. i.e. Something that you most certainly can't do easily with Skype as it's leaps and bounds more complicated to reverse-engineer.
"Not saying skype is better, just glad to see crappy proprietary tech die out."
What? Let me rephrase how I re-read your sentence: "Not saying skype is better, just glad to see crappy proprietary tech get replaced by even less open and more difficult to reverse-engineer tech."
Why would you be glad about that? You're contradicting your own viewpoint about how bad "proprietary tech" is by advocating it's replacement by an even more "proprietary tech"
Well from the practical perspective what happens is what zo1 wrote: "crappy proprietary tech get replaced by even less open and more difficult to reverse-engineer tech". What's more likely - former MSN users switching to XMPP or to Skype?
The main difference I see between MSNP and Skype is that much of MSNP could be figured out in a day just by sniffing packets, which is probably what lead to a proliferation of alternative clients and client libraries for it. The (deliberate?) complexity of Skype means that RE attempts are more difficult, so there are fewer people with the skills and inclination to do it. Hopefully there will be more focus on it now, but it's still a huge effort in comparison.
Personally, I'm not too fond of XMPP either; something more similar to IRC would be my preference. But all of that doesn't matter when almost everyone you know used/uses MSNP/Skype, and from experience it's very difficult to change that, so any progress toward an open-source Skype client will be great.