Let me clarify some things I've noticed some people get messed up about after reading this entire thread:

Telepathy is a framework for building IM clients. Plugins can be written for telepathy, that allow any application using it to connect to different protocols.

Empathy (the gnome chat client) uses it as a backend, as well as the maemo chat client, and probably some other clients do as well.

This means that writting an Y-protocol plugin for telepathy, enables all these clients to connect to Y-protocol.



On the other hand, there's pidgin (http://pidgin.im). It's a multiplatorm IM client, that also uses plugins for different protocols; there are called "prpls".

Finally, there's a telepathy plugin, that in turn, uses prpls. So, by writting a plugin for pidgin, you allow pidgin to use it, and telepathy as well.

I'd vote for a pidgin plugin, since this mean that we allow a greater number of clients to use it.


Also, a LICENSE AGREEMENT forbids you from reverse engineering. If it's enforcable or not, depends on where you live, BUT, if person A provides the dumps, and person B develops, person B has never agreed to any license, so he's surely in the clear.

Finally, let me state that while I think this is a cool effort to open up the maemo community, I wonder this:
Why do you want to use a closed-source, pay-for, closed-protocol, when you can opt for something pretty open like XMPP (gtalk is just one more XMPP server), or at least something that isn't closed and pay-for. Maemo supports all of this, as does android, pidgin, desktop, etc.