[JDEV] JabberCentral [Was: Trillian Poll]

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

"David 'TheRaven' Chisnall" <theraven at sucs.org> wrote on 16-6-2003 
15:54:07: 
>
>I think the point is that if a portal is seen as being officially 
>endorsed by the JSF, 

My message wasn't in the context of such a portal (nor was the 
discussion at the moment, at least not from what I read). Also, reading 
the various reactions, it seems there will not be such a portal, at 
least not by the JSF. (besides from jabber.org). 

>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.  

The discussion surthenly wasn't just centred around the idea of a "JSF" 
portal. I also seriously doubt the paying some JSF geek to write a 
portal all day is the only (or the right) way to succes. In fact, quite 
the opposite is true, look at Poland for example. "The revolution" 
there happend without anyone in the JSF even *knowing* until Ralphm's 
jabber world-map stared filling up with Polish people and we saw some 
very intresting software releases coming out of Poland (WPJabber and 
JIT for example). 

But don't forget about the smaller scale portal succeses either, for 
example if I check status.myJabber.net I can see 899 people are online 
there. Those portals will only grow once it's eayser for people to have 
a jabber-account. For that you need clients that make switching easyer 
(GAIM, Trillian, LICQ and such have a definate edge here over any 
client that does "just" jabber), and servers to host those clients. 
That way you're expanding in two directions, "Jabber-only" portals, 
that become more and more usable as more and more people switch to a 
jabber-enabled client, and those people will bring in more people to 
the portals, or as an alternative, make more people switch to GAIM, 
Trillian, etc. 

There's no need for 1 big "JSF-thumbs-up" portal that can't focus on 
the end-user cause it might piss off some developers. The JSF also 
doesn't have to pay someone to build a BSD licensed portal, if we want 
one we can build one can't we? There's already several projects 
underway that, for example, work on forum intergration. 

-- 
Tijl Houtbeckers
Software Engineer @ Splendo
The Netherlands