Enabling jabber in WebOS on the Palm Pre using a binary patch

One of my main complaints about the palm Pre is that there is no support for the major IM protocol's such as jabber, icq, aim, msn, ...

As I discovered, they're actually using a library (libpurple) that supports all those protocols. It's just the UI and the intermediate LibpurpleAdapter program which artificially restrict the features that this library offers.

So it sounds to me like palm is getting money or other favors from Google to artificially restrict the capabilities of the Webos messenger.

As I have described in this mail to the webos-internals mailing list, you can actually use a very simple one-byte binary patch to LibpurpleAdapter to enable jabber support.

After that binary patch, you can add jabber contacts with the regular user@jabber-server.doma.in address and use the regular messenger application for keeping in touch with your jabber contacts. Just like how it is supposed to be.

Legal notice: Making this binary patch is legal, since LibpurpleAdapter is actually released under LGPL. If you have a working build environment for the Pre with all the libpurple headers, you can of course modify the source code and recompile it (as explained in the mail).

Side note: The libpurple-adapter source code that Palm has published on opensource.palm.com does not correspond to the actual binary code. This is a LGPL violation. However, since palm is the copyright holder, nobody can really do anything about it. But it once again shows that the software build/release process does not automatically generate the source code packages and that there is an erroneous manual process involved :(