[JDEV] Jabber, the Name

[temas]

I want to very very strongly restate what Peter said.... The lack of
powerful transports and document ation is because of people, not the
corporations, and suggesting otherwise is a bit ludicrous in my opinion.
These are mundane tasks, and basically no one will ever step up to the
plate.  I have, and even I feel it sucks.  I get bored and lose interest
in them for a while, and eventually come back.  I mean seriously, I've
been working on aim transport for what 2+ years now.  I haven't even
seen a spec of someone saying, "hey can I help you?"  All I hear is,
"this doesn't work, that doesn't work", "When's the next release", "AOL
blocked us again, are you fixing it?"  To put it bluntly, it's
discouraging, very discouraging at times.  I keep doing it though
because I know people want it.

Documentation is the same way.  Eliot Landrum and I were just having a
conversation this morning about how we've seen a ton of people start to
step up to the plate and say hey, we're going to help document.  Then
they're gone.  2 years, and it's still Eliot, Peter and myself that
primarily work on docs.  What is that?  People complain constantly and
the project gets constant grief over it, but we've been working on a
hundred and one projects with a core group of maybe 5 dudes to get this
all out.  Some things just fall on the wayside.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to start preaching that "if you don't
like it fix it" line, because I personally don't believe in it.  Yes
that's always an option, but that doesn't get you devoted people, it
just gets you quick fixes that are incomplete to the problem.  What
needs to happen (and is being worked on) is a solid structure to get
people involved.  I would point to docs-dev to see that starting to
happen for the docs project, and to jabelin for server development, as
well as the foundation for protocol development.  We're trying our
hardest now, and I think it's going to pay off very shortly now.

On the issue of the Jabber name we talked about this extensively when
jer and I were up at Jabber.Com last time.  Peter has touched on some of
the points we discussed there but I haven't seen anything directly on
here from it.  I guess Bauer and Jer want to discuss this tomorrow in
the Foundation meeting.

Hope that sheds some light on my views and thoughts about the issues
besides the actuall Jabber name.

--temas


On 15 May 2001 16:56:42 -0600, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Flora Brunas wrote:

> 
> 
> > A major reason why Jabber transports have trouble,
> > things aren't documented, and you're running into
> > other technical problems is because Jabber.com
> > prevents other corporations from using the Jabber
> > name.
> 
> 
> The major reason for the problems you cite is that this is an 
> open-source project in which relatively few people and companies have 
> been interested until quite recently. We haven't exactly been 
> overflowing with people willing to do the dirty jobs like writing 
> transports (ick!) and documentation -- and those who have been willing 
> to do these things have not necessarily had a great deal of time to 
> spend on these activities.
> 
> At least so it seems to me.
> 
> Peter
> 
> -- 
> Peter Saint-Andre
> stpeter at jabber.org
> 
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