[JDEV] JabberCentral [Was: Trillian Poll]

[David 'TheRaven' Chisnall]

I think the point is that if a portal is seen as being officially 
endorsed by the JSF, and names an 'Official Client' that this, by 
extension, makes all other clients 'unofficial clients'.  The assumption 
is that unofficial clients are less good, and so by claiming that one 
client is 'official' you are insulting all of the others.  
Of course for your own portal this is not an issue.  I recommend that 
anyone using my server from Windows uses JAJC (because it seems the most 
feature-complete and easy to use) and from Linux uses Gabber (because it 
had all of the features I wanted at the time, although it's getting a 
bit long in the tooth now.  Really looking forward to Gabber2).  The 
discussion here is not about individual servers, however, it is about a 
portal which is going to be the consumer-facing part of the Jabber 
community.  Such a site would have a responsibility to the entire Jabber 
community which is not served by insulting our most valuable asset, 
namely the people who give up their own time to write free software for 
Jabber.  I think that the only way we could justify an 'official' client 
would be if the JSF were willing to pay someone to work full time on it, 
and release the code under a BSD-style license so that anyone (open 
source or commercial) could use it as a base for their own clients, and 
I would not consider this to be a particularly sensible use of resources.  

Tijl Houtbeckers wrote:

>"Michael Brown" <michael at aurora.gen.nz> wrote on 16-6-2003 10:37:16:
>  
>
>>Rachel - seriously, drop the term "Official Client" - please. That is
>>really going to start pissing off other client developers (starting 
>>with me). 
>>    
>>
>
>If I make a portal and choose an official client for it (and call it 
>exactly that), there's nothing you can do about it. It's very 
>unfortunate if that would piss you off (for you), but I don't see any 
>reason why it should upset you in the first place? The choice of client 
>in Jabber is not limited to the end-user. The provider of the server 
>has the same right of choosing a client. And yes, it can go hand in 
>hand with promotion of Jabber. Tipic comes to mind as an example. 
>
>  
>