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France Telecom To Support Jabber
AmX writes: "I've just seen on Jabber.com that France Telecom is going to invest $7 million in Jabber.com in exchange for a 23% equity interest in the company. Nice to see a big company supporting this technology. The details are here." With that kind of funding, perhaps Jabber really will become the next big thing. Not getting locked out of proprietary messaging systems would be a benefit to everyone. (Psss, don't forget jabber.org, too.)
Quote: Strange, I always thought that jabber.ORG defined the technology direction (rather than jabber.COM). I am happy for jabber.com though. $7 mil can definitely help keep them going for a while if used wisely.
To me, Jabber's strength comes from the fact that it's a distributed server system and not centralized. No one company controls the technology direction. Every company who implements the jabber server has complete control to their own userbase, and all devices that implement the jabber protocol should be able to talk with each other - this means that if we have IM implemented on all sorts of devices - Palm, Computer, Cell phones,
If a large company such as Microsoft... or even a consumer electronics company such as Sony steps in to support Jabber, it would go a loooong way to standardizing it. They don't even have to invest like FT... just step in and say, "We like this standard and will implement it in our future products."
- Because current messaging is getting old. SMS is excellent for simple messaging between phones but thats about it. - Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM. - Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that. - Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves - And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned.
[Please type your sig here.]
Download the Jabber server source.
Some of the prettiest C I have seen. Comments where they should be. Written modular and split up into parts that make sense. Simply and elegant memory manager. Hell we ARE talking about the server to jabber. If you dont like jabber.com server start your own server and get your friends using it!
Best of all, my company has looked at possibly using Jabber server side and open documentation for our own custom chat client. Grab the windows jabberCOM and hack up a quick VB client, instant chat the way you like it...
Jabber is some seriously cool stuff and is IM the right way IMO.
Jeremy
- jabber has some nice server-side features for blocking messages you dont want to see
- you can run your own jabber server if you want
- jabber supports an irc gatway
- jabber has its own "groupchat" protocol section
regarding the scripting issue, theres at least 2 solutions to that. the first is obvious: make a scriptable IM client. the second is to make an irc module to jserver. there is already a very basic one, but its old and im not sure if it works with the latest server version.that means you could use jabber from your irc client (join #jabber, your contact list are shown as users in the channel, online people have ops etc.) and you can join groupchat channels on any server. eg myroom@myjserver.org, jdev@jabber.org, ircchan%irc.light.se@irc.myjserver.org.
you could even add server side channel bookmarks and nickserv identifys.
> Is France trying to compete with other countries
> in todays electronics?
1st, France does very well in today's electronics, thank you. 2nd, it's not the French government who decides where FTT will invest its money, so THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT.
You may not be a conspiracist, but at least you're a stereotype-prone ignorant.
Dammit.
Taking a look at their site, not only do they plan on making money for the 'windows' version of the client, but if you pay attention to the pics shown, you can actually have your own internal jabber server.
.02 cents worth, which with the recent crash of the market makes it more like .000045 cents worth.
What that means is that companies such as cisco, could set up their own jabber server to allow their CCO members to instant message with a Rep regarding problems (maybe bad example because if your network is down, no chance of getting to cisco in the first place).
When IM (read: icq) started becoming popular, I could imagine big companies providing tech support via IM. What happened to that? I don't know.. maybe the technology was too foreign to some of the execs and what FT is planning to do with the software is making it friendlier to the big cheeses, which will mean revenue and a return on their investment.
--
That of course is just my
I'm just going to answer all of the why use Jabber questions here. :)
Security. Jabber has support for ssl and some clients (Gabber) have built in support for pgp. Also because it is really free and open you can set up an internal server if you want and never go to the internet.
It supports most of the protocols. I can still talk to my friends who use ICQ and can talk to my friends who are on Jabber and my friend who uses MSN from one client.
I have my profile wherever I go. Since contacts and all the other information are all serverside I can have the same setup at home, at work, on the road with no effort. Even if it was nothing but an ICQ replacement that feature would make it worth it.
It is open. That is a good thing by itself.
In short Jaber is good use it and support it add squadboy@jabber.org to your contacts.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
You forget that ICQ is controlled by a corporation. Here are the 3 main reasons to use Jabber:
1) No corporate control.
2) No central server.
3) Open standard.
This puts Jabber in the same class as email. I run my own server and I can say who can have accounts with my system. If some other server goes down, it does not affect me. This is how IM should have been since the very beginning. You can whine all day about the number of users AIM has, or how cool ICQ is, but when it comes down to it, they all suck because they violate those 3 items above.
Let's not forget that Jabber also has some good functionality:
1) Serverside contact list.
2) Multiple chat transports (for evangelizing to other IM users)
3) Authorization that actually works.
Go, quickly! http://www.jabbercentral.com/
-Justin
*DISCLAIMER* I work for Jabber.com. Thought I'd take a few moments to respond to a few things.
1. jabber.com hired pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers.
At one time a lot of different people worked for jabber.com but right now pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers DON'T work for jabber.com. And most all of them work on the open source code anyway.
2. The jabber.org guys changed away from GPL to jabber.com's own JOSL ("jabber open source license").
It's more we like adding onto, not changing away from GPL. Like many other Open Source Licenses JOSL allows dual-licensing. Best of both worlds.
3. It is unclear (to me) if you contribute to jabber.org how/if your work will be pulled into jabber.com.
You're work's under your own copyright. Like other open source code, you agree to submit your changes for inclusion in a derivative open source work but that's all. That work will have to be open source too. We can't use your stuff without your permission in any other way. No one can.
4. jabber.com is the "commercial" version of jabber.org. You pay them for it and they give various kinds of support. They've supposedly done alot of testing on it.
Yep. Following some of the best open source business examples.
5. jabber.com is a completely different codebase than jabber.org. (for example .com uses pthreads and .org uses pth different thread libs)). The .com people are trying to add clustering and scalability that .org's code base doesn't have. I'm not sure if they're giving that back to .org
Not completely, no. And a pthreads version of the .com code has already been released to open source.
6. I'm skeptical as to how much .org will continue to thrive (as opposed to before .com) now that its main developers are working for .com on a different code base.
There's no two ways about this: jabber.org will thrive. We're doing a number of things to insure this, most importantly creating the Jabber Foundation, modeled along the lines of the Apache Foundation. We don't have all the answers on balancing commercial and open source relationships. We're open to all kinds of suggestions on how to do this. But know this: we are bound and determined to commit the resources to insure the Project grows.
7. As of a month ago, the jabber.com server didn't support the msn/yahoo/aim connections because that code is contained in "transports" modules designed to work with jabber.org's vastly different pth-based code base. And my understanding was it would be a "couple of quarter" before they're in. When you try out jabber.com's open server and see that it does appear to connect to msn/yahoo/aim, the way they are doing it is they are running a jabber.org server side-by-side with the jabber.com server and doing a jabber-jabber intermediate transport (ie the .com server is relying on the .org server to do the msn/yahoo/aim connections). I'm saying this is good or bad, but it is definitely a factor if you're considering buying a jabber.com server and support to allow your customers to connect to aim/yahoo/msn.
We're all working on the best way to do this. I think you'll see some progress sooner than later.
8. jabber.com won't sell support for aim/msn/yahoo because they can't "indemnify" it (or whatever) - they can't supposedly guarantee the connectivity. While it is true they can't guarantee the connectivity (until aim/yahoo/msn license it) it seems to me they can still sell it while explicitly stating they can't guarantee it. (I believe Odigo does - odigo.com is another IM solution that sells server, client, custom IM stuff).
See above.
Hey, if you have any questions, I'm bauer at jabber.com.
10 January 1610