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. [...]
[...] I've come across something interesting; "telepathy-butterfly" (the msn plugin) is implemented in python. I'm currenly writting a foursquare client in python for maemo, so once I'm done and have some more time on my hands, I might be able to help you guys implementing a WA plugin (depends if I find some good XMPP implementation to use as a reference, since this is strongly XMPP-based).