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XMPP Gets An IETF Working Group
An anonymous reader writes "The IETF has approved the formation of a Working Group to continue evolving the XMPP protocol." Interoperable instant messaging, who'd a thunk it. Our previous story has more information.
I'm glad that it is finally dawning on the Big Technology powers-that-be that proprietary messaging schemes are bad for everyone's business. This is definitely needed if wireless is really to be the way of the future, and since there is so much money being spent on the gadgets, it's inevitable that they are going to have to play nice and compete on some other basis besides lock-out.
Don't read this!
However, there is no guarantee that they will be implemented properly. For instance, Microsoft has had a long history of perverting open standards/languages (i.e. creating MSSMB instead of using the current standard and bastardizing Java). So, yes, this is a good thing, but some how, I don't see a lot of the established messaging services changing their ways. I hope I am wrong though.
I don't see any of the big players adopting it when they all want control of the space. Why should AOL or Microsoft get on board to be inter-operable? They loose the control over what the end user sees.
While the emergence of a standard will quickly generate open source implementations (I can easily see, say, licq supporting the standard within days of the first draft) there is no incentive for the big corporate players to support it, and indeed a great many reasons not to.
Their interrest lies not in interoperability, but making sure that their customers can only talk to their customers so that if you want to be able to IM your brother-in-law or somesuch you have to subscribe to their service (even if it's in a way just as "simple" as feeding them your email for generating spam).
This means that, in the long run, the mass market consumer will not be able to talk to the open source clients we geeks will be using.
Like I said, wishful thinking. If we're really lucky this is how things will happen, and we'll have an IM that isn't swamped with hundreds of thousands of inane twinks and lusers spamming us with request for pr0n or cybersex. :-)
-- MG
There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.
Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.
Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.
-Rusty
You never know...
First off that the IETF supporting a working group for XMPP/Jabber kicks ass. But it will not give us what it promises. In no fault of its own... I am sure it will do what it is designed for from a tech POV. Business (read: AOL MSN Yahoo, etc) don't want it. They more than don't want it, they are probably keeping an eye on it out of concern. AOL is the best example of this. They get people to sign up because their friends signed up and they can chat (and according to the ads you can even send pictures in email! WOW!) They don't want you to be able to use just any ISP. Or just any anything. They will not use XMPP/Jabber. They will intentionally not work with XMPP/Jabber. AOL excels at not cooperating in the IM client area. They want it to bee this way, not because they could not from a protocol/technology point of view
In the end XMPP/Jabber will only work with itself. A marvel of interoperability.
And this suits me just fine. They can keep their IM-BS. The rest of us can use somthing else.
What we really need is interoperability at the back-end--AOL IM servers need to talk to MSN IM and to IRC. Maybe standardized protocols would help with that a little (the AOL server could pretend to be a client for MSN), but I suspect lack of connectivity is more of a business thing.