Do you have empathy for Empathy?

Is there a point at which a robust back-end beats up-front encryption and security functionality and, crucially, could that reality extend to open source? Well, if you'd asked me last week I'd have told you no, but I would have reminded you to keep taking the little white happy pills.

After a week of working at the coalface of open source web application excellence for a report I just might have up my sleeve if you ask me nicely, I uncovered a few surprising truths that have been guiding the development of even the most well known open source foundations out there including Ubuntu itself.

It seems that during the evolutionary progression from Hoary Hedgehog to Jaunty Jackaloop and Maverik Meerkat, certain augmentations have been made on the basis of front end usability – and in some cases, a decision to bring an application into line has been more to do with the strength and/or robustness of its back end.

What am I talking about? Let me explain…

If you're not familiar with it already, Empathy has been argued to be a 'reasonable' open source alternative Instant Messaging client. It is based on the Telepathy communications framework, which supports text, voice and video chat, as well as file transfers over a variety of protocols. Crucially, Empathy took over as default the messenger in residence replacing the previously used Pidgin in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) in October 2009 and Fedora 12 in November 2009.

But why did this happen?

Well it's a good tool by all accounts and there's plenty of online background (with lots of screen shots) you can read to get a feel for how it works before you install it. But Pidgin was (and still is) arguably more secure because Empathy lacks privacy and security provisioning systems to enable a deniable encryption layer.

OK so what, Empathy does have a fancy pants front end with an assortment of re-usable graphical user interface widgets - all of which are aligned for developing instant messaging clients for the GNOME desktop.

There's also an auto-away function that uses the GNOME screensaver and smiley emoticons, spell checking and all the extra toppings and special sauce that you might expect from a more commercially backed proprietary project. But it's still less secure.

So I dug and I dug, I emailed and I Tweeted and the conclusion seems to be that Empathy has so much of a robust back-end that any misgivings you might have about security in terms of its general usage seem to be outweighed. Is that because the kind of user who would typically opt for an open source Instant Messenger ought to be sensible enough to avoid the odd bit of obvious spam and so it's more important to have a good back end with a slick UI? You tell me.