[JDEV] im unified

[Rob Brown]

At 06:53 PM 8/28/00 +0200, you wrote:
>Personally I'm not a huge fan of IMunified.

May I jump in here? (with my first message to the group)

It seems to me that the reasons you listed explain not why we should not be 
fans of IMUnified, but why IMUnified shouldn't be fans of Jabber.org.

I personally think it would be greatly in Jabber.org's interest to join 
this coalition.  If nothing else, it might allow Jabber users to more 
seamlessly communicate with users of those member instant messaging systems 
(MSN, Powow, Yahoo, etc), without having to get accounts at all those 
respective systems.  It also would likely help to get Jabber's name in the 
press here and there.

I also think it is in IMUnified's interest to include Jabber, the 
open-sourceness of Jabber can give them credibility (or, maybe a more 
accurate way of putting it, if they refuse membership to Jabber.org, it 
could be a huge blight on their credibility).

I think that as IM systems become more interoperable, people will flock 
towards Jabber for all the reasons you mention and more.  But in the 
meantime Jabber should be as aggressive as possible in promoting 
interoperability, IMO, and joining IMUnified would be a part of that effort.

regards,
rob

>1)  The members of Imunified have an add based revenue.  Therefor, I
>doubt they want you to use an open source client they haven't
>authorized.  I also think that although they claim to want
>compatibility they only do so because it is forced on them by custo
>mer demand and because AOL has a larger share of the market.  It's
>highly probable that they view an open source Jabber server as
>competition.  Jabber _does_ want compatibility because it's revenue is
>not based on advertisements.  Jer knows that people will be willing to
>pay him the big bucks to make Jabber scalable to a couple million
>users.  :)
>
>2)  They have large existing user bases that won't be eager to change
>clients.  This makes me think they are most concerned about creating
>compatibility at the server to server level and not at the client
>level.  This fits with their advertisement business model.
>
>Jabber offers so much more because the server is open source and the
>protocol is distributed.  I hope people don't settle for using close
>source MSN just because it can now communicate to yahoo messenger, when
>they could get a much better Jabber client with a Jabber account from
>their ISP, college or business.
>
>sincerely,
>Dan Carpenter (error27)