[JDEV] JabberCentral [Was: Trillian Poll]

[Andrew Sayers]

There are three angles I'd like to take this from, (having my cake,
eating it, ...):

1:

It's true that there's nothing to stop people talking about an "official
client".  There's also nothing to stop people putting racist jokes in
their signatures or naked women on the background of their website.
It's frowned upon because it has a divisive and demoralising effect on
parts of our community.  Since most of us aren't getting paid for this,
it's especially important that people make the effort to keep the Jabber
community friendly and welcoming.  The same logic was at the root of my
complaints about the use of the term "legacy protocol".

2:

I would expect that labelling one client "official" would encourage
people developing that client to think "we're the best, so why try
harder?", and would put pressure on people developing clients to be
"compatible with" (i.e. paler imitations of) the official client.  You
can see this kind of thinking in word processor design, where Word is
seen by many as the gold standard (even when its design is badly
broken), and programs that do things another way are dismissed as
non-standard.

3:

I don't understand why some people have a problem with HTML e-mail,
prefer Outlook Express to mutt, like to get drunk every night, are into
fashion, have a lower (or higher) privacy threshold than mine, and so
on.  But the fact is that they do, and it's easy enough for me to
accomodate their wishes - after all, they're probably doing plenty to
accomodate mine without my knowing.

	- Andrew