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What I'm worried about: The protocol is proprietary, not a public API and all official clients can be updated by Facebook almost instantly. This means they can make arbitrary changes to the protocol at any time without bothering the users of official clients very much.

This library would have to keep up with all the changes or clients would quickly stop working. So is the manpower there to do this?

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Well there used to be this thing called AOL instant messenger. Then people cloned the protocol. So AOL would just start causing purposeful buffer overflows that would take them to specific parts in their code but mess up the people trying to imitate it. But they figured it out, and now they teach students in class how to overcome it. The other illegal thing they taught us was decrypting a DVD.

This in NO way addresses "proprietary protocol".

which is OK, as long as there is a community to support the effort. I remember when Pidgin (or another IM client) had to keep up with not one, but three protocols: MSN, Yahoo and AOL. And that was done before the age of Github and pull requests.

don't forget google-sorry-excuse-for-xmpp jabber implementation on gtalk.

But it is nice to see the world coming to yet another cycle. sigh.

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