Cisco To Buy Jabber

Danny Rathjens writes "In the continuing trend of big companies buying out small companies with open source products, Cisco has announced that they are buying Jabber. The press release doesn't really talk about the open source aspect of Jabber, and Jabber's website doesn't mention the news yet. I'm sure the question many of us have is whether Jabber's open source status will be changed in any way due to the purchase." Reader Eddytorial had this to contribute: "eWEEK offers a good look into how Jabber's messaging client will fit into Cisco Systems' overall 'presence' strategy in its market wars with Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel, and others. Cisco, which already had a basic instant messaging option, but one that didn't scale for an enterprise nearly as well as Jabber's, has just about everything else in place." It's also worth noting that Cisco open-sourced Etch in recent months.

Comments

Nothing new for Cisco

[Rayeth]

I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.

Can I replace Chambers as the CEO?

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.

Although I don't think that it's the case here Cisco also has a history of buying the competition and discontinuing their products. Buyouts can be a way to increase your engineering staff.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[phillyclaude]

I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.

Can I replace Chambers as the CEO?

Cisco's done that along. pretty much every product line besides routers has been an acquisition

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[Neanderthal Ninny]

Buy enough stock and get on the Board of Directors and you can find someone to replace Chambers.
Cisco, like Oracle, are in the enterprise level market for many years but Cisco has several SMB/consumer division like Linksys so this is nothing new to them. Jabber will increase the horizontal market for Cisco.
Oracle doesn't really have something so it will interesting to see what they take over...er merge.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[ksd1337]

Even if it were the case, it wouldn't matter. Jabber, the IM protocol, is open-source, so it will continue to be developed for a long time even if the official team is disbanded to be used as engineers for other projects.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[cloakable]

If they've bought the rights to Jabber, they can close source it from the next version. The current version will still be open source though, and would likely be forked.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[shitzu]

How could a "protocol" be "open source"? A protocol does not hava a "source", so it would be very hard to make it "open source".

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the strategy: Microsoft wants to get in to unified communications, to compete with Cisco, but it has a roundabout strategy--promote Exchange, which has unified inbox capabilities, and get people to buy a package of client access licenses that includes not only the Exchange CALs they need, but the Communications Server CALs they need. Since the CALs are the most costly part of a Microsoft solution, it's easy to go back to those customers and tell them, hey, you've already spent most of the money on a Microsoft VoIP solution. All you need is the (relatively cheap) server license. Cisco is trying to intercept that sales tactic. Every customer that buys a Cisco e-mail (PostPath) solution, who uses WebEx (instead of Live Meeting), or Jabber (instead of Communications Server) for IM and presence is innoculated against the Microsoft competition. Cisco is still missing a strong portal/content management solution to compete with SharePoint, so if I'm right, you'll see that soon. The point is that these open-source products (although WebEx wasn't open source) are good, they're relatively inexpensive, and they give Cisco the ability to undercut Microsoft's pricing on messaging and collaboration products thus preventing Microsoft from undercutting Cisco pricing on VoIP. The strategy for both companies is to give away stuff that isn't a current critical revenue stream to target the competition's sweet spot or protect its own. MS tries to make Comm Server a cheap addition because there's a huge VoIP opportunity, currently owned by Cisco. Cisco is making e-mail and collaboration really cheap, because those are current big busnesses for Microsoft, and if it undercuts that business it protects its own sweet spot.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how most big companies work. Microsoft, Sun, IBM, even the idiots at Google do it all the time.

Re:Nothing new for Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Forking is not even necessary. There are already tens of different implementations of both Jabber servers and Jabber clients out there, both Free/Open Source and proprietary.

These days, Jabber works very similar to "Email plus realtime plus presence notification plus a number of optional addons" from a technical and organisational perspective. It's not just by chance that JabberIDs look exactly like email addresses. Just as with email, the protocols behind Jabber are free an open.

Cisco might be able to buy Jabber Inc., but saying that someone is buying "Jabber" makes about as much sense as saying that somebody is buying "Email".

Cisco integration finally?

[CaptainPuff]

Does this mean I can finally hook our jabber based IM server/clients into Cisco Call Manager as easy as I can into our SIP stuff without going through a god awful JTAPI interface? I can't wait!!!

Or....

[Starmengau]

I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted, but whether Cisco will try to be all redactive and decide that the open source licensing of current and previous versions of jabber (which for most people works perfectly well as it is) are unforkable and/or non-distributable.

Re:Or....

[Darkness404]

but whether Cisco will try to be all redactive and decide that the open source licensing of current and previous versions of jabber (which for most people works perfectly well as it is) are unforkable and/or non-distributable.

Ummm... How many companies have managed to successfully stop all forks of a product without killing the current product?

Re:Or....

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Doesn't much matter whether they try or not. I don't know of any even remotely common OSS licences that can be retroactively rescinded. They can certainly stop releasing under an OSS licence, and they could, if they felt like it, pull all the mirrors they control quite suddenly; but if somebody else has a copy that has been released under an OSS licence, they can't do much of anything about it.

Re:Or....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted

...whether Jabber's open-source status will be affected . This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.

Re:Or....

[Randle_Revar]

Well, Jabber Inc owns Jabber XCP, which is closed already.

Jabberd 1.4 and Jabberd2 are not owned, controlled or even affiliated with Jabber Inc. Openfire and ejabberd are likewise not connected to Jabber Inc. Furthermore, all are FOSS and the license cannot be revoked.

As for XMPP itself, it is managed by the independent, non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation, and the core of XMPP also exists as several Standards Track IETF RFCs.

Re:Or....

[SL Baur]

I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted, but whether Cisco will try to be all redactive

Bah.

THEY^H^H^H^HWE CANNOT DO THAT.

Any questions?

Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, primarily supporting Open Source within the company. I do not speak for Cisco.

Re:Or....

[SL Baur]

Ummm... How many companies have managed to successfully stop all forks of a product without killing the current product?

Heh, like Lucid Emacs?

Re:Or....

[bl8n8r]

> decide that the open source licensing of current and previous versions
> of jabber (which for most people works perfectly well as it is) are
> unforkable and/or non-distributable.

You can't do that (under the GPL anyway). Once a pile of code is
released under GPL, the licensing status for that version cannot be changed.

Worst case, as far as I can see, is Cisco says that jabber is assimilated
and no longer GPL'd. That doesn't stop anyone from taking code from last
week (already released) and forking.

Re:Or....

[darkpixel2k]

Doesn't much matter whether they try or not. I don't know of any even remotely common OSS licences that can be retroactively rescinded. They can certainly stop releasing under an OSS licence, and they could, if they felt like it, pull all the mirrors they control quite suddenly; but if somebody else has a copy that has been released under an OSS licence, they can't do much of anything about it.

But how can you 'buy the rights' to a program and then close source it? Did they find each and every developer that contributed to Jabber and get him/her/them to allow Cisco to have their 'share' in the ownership?

If I release a cool product under Open Source, and then 50 other developers contribute to it--how can I sell the license to use their work and close source it?

Re:Or....

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As others have pointed out, Jabber inc. doesn't even have an OSS of note, so it doesn't really apply in this case. The question is a valid one, though.

You do require the permission of all copyright holders of portions of a work in order to relicence that work. For just this reason, some projects will only accept code contributions on the condition that copyright of the contributed code be assigned to the project owner. This allows the project owner to make licensing changes in the future. Some projects have more limited requirements(a project that releases under dual or tri licence might only accept code if the contributor agrees to licence that code under all the licences that the project uses). Some projects, like the linux kernel, have no such requirements(other than GPL compatible licencing) and would be quite difficult to relicence.

So, you cannot relicence something that belongs to somebody else without their permission; but some projects have requirements aimed at preventing just that issue.

Re:Or....

[Warbothong]

This has very little to do with Open Source. Jabber sells proprietary software http://www.jabber.com/ (NOT http://www.jabber.org/ ) which uses the XMPP system they developed (which used to be called the "Jabber" network, but changed its name when it was standardised).

XMPP is currently looked after by the XMPP Standards Foundation, so this doesn't affect the status of the standards, except that Peter Saint-Andre, who does a lot of the work mantaining, improving and drafting XMPP-based standards, works for Jabber. Despite the volume of his work, however, the XSF still has to approve the standards he writes (just like if I wrote a standard, or Google did, or Microsoft), so there's been no shift of power over XMPP.

All of the Open Source XMPP software out there will continue unaffected by this, except that there may be more users, developers and libraries available as Cisco spreads the technology.

Re:Or....

[turbidostato]

"If I release a cool product under Open Source, and then 50 other developers contribute to it--how can I sell the license to use their work and close source it?"

Do it the way other companies already have done it: only accept patches if copyright is transferred to you. That of course, won't disallow forks, but it will ensure you will be in control about the next release's license.

Cisco?

[Quiet_Desperation]

I thought Cisco was the imaginary company that runs the internet in Eureka?

Jabber Inc

[ensignyu]

It's important to note that Cisco is only buying Jabber Inc. XMPP is an open standard, so anyone can implement their own client or server, and lots of people have. That's not going to change, regardless of what Cisco does.

Furthermore, Jabber Inc's XCP server isn't even open source. I suspect that other Jabber servers such as the open source jabberd and ejabberd are much more commonly used in the open source community.

So Cisco's acquisition of Jabber Inc really has no impact on the Jabber/XMPP open source community. In fact, continuing to develop Jabber XCP as a commercial product can only help push the adoption of XMPP, which is good for everyone.

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if Cisco starts closing down the source?

Re:Jabber Inc

[mo]

The weird thing about Jabber Inc. is how irrelevant they are to the XMPP scene. There's a huge array of jabber servers and clients out there, and Jabber Inc. doesn't really have anything to do with any of them. Then there's the whole branding shift from calling it XMPP instead of Jabber. I'm not quite sure what Jabber Inc. brings to the table for Cisco to buy them.

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

Jabber Inc was never a huge player in the Jabber scene. They're just a company that snatched the name Jabber after a similarly named protocol was invented.

Well, at least it worked for fooling Cisco.

Re:Jabber Inc

[gad_zuki!]

I dont think it brings anything to the table for them. The higher-ups and bean counters wanted to "own" some part of this new protocol but you cant buy an open standard. So they just bought this firm and put it on the big list of "technologies we bought." Now Jabber isnt some hackey protocol, its a respectable product from a smart acquisition. Someone at Cisco is no doubt getting promoted for wasting money. Perhaps this purchase indemnifies them in some legal way I dont quite understand.

To be fair, they are probably buy some mindshare and expertise, but how hard is it to write IM servers and clients when the protocol is already in use?

Re:Jabber Inc

[davolfman]

Or perhaps it gets them a few programmers who already know the ins and outs of said protocol and can now be added to projects creating an enterprise product from the system.

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the millions of eyeballs will develop a better product from the existing source than the the few paid developers will. Go eyeballs!

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... the point is its ALREADY closed. Cisco bought a closed source product, nothing open source and nothing to do with the open standard, just a popular proprietary closed source implementation of the standard.

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

Acquisitions do include more than the products and services alone. Cisco also bought Jabber Inc.'s customer base, for instance. They also bought time: if they had to start implement XMPP software from scratch, they would lose a lot of time that may be critical. Maybe Cisco studied the market and believes the market for XMPP will increase by 1000% the next years; if they had to start from scratch they would miss most of this opportunity. Another strategic reason why acquisitions happen is that Cisco may have bought Jabber Inc to make it impossible for one of Cisco's competitors to buy it.

Re:Jabber Inc

[mike_sucks]

Can someone please mod this up further? Geeze, talk about most misleading story of the day.

/Mike

Re:Jabber Inc

[rastoboy29]

Who is the organizer of the XMPP working group?  Who accepts/rejects new additions to the standard?

Re:Jabber Inc

[Anonymous Coward]

What you don't know is that Jabber Inc. pays the salary of the guy that writes many (most!) of the open standards (RFCs and XEPs) which comprise XMPP. So fuck off when you say shit like "irrelevant". Now Cisco pays that guy, so you should really say "Thanks Cisco!"

Re:Jabber Inc

[nicfit]

You Sir are an idiot.

Re:Jabber Inc

[nurb432]

But you don't want to mess up the sensationalistic summary with facts do you?

All quite true 'the protocol is free' comments aside, they did buy brand recognition, which is a pretty powerful tool and can work for us, or against us depending on what Cisco has planned.

Re:Jabber Inc

[mgblst]

Wow, if only there was another way of doing this, like creating job adds paying a lot of money (but $56 million)

Re:Jabber Inc

[davolfman]

Job ads are a crapshoot anyway, especially if centralized management prevents hiring authority by those able to judge competence. Also if you can skip the costs of training, acclimating a new team to each other, leasing new space to put them in, appropriating new computers. I could see a drop in the bucket like $56 million must be for Cisco with several advantage in time-to-market could make buying the whole kit-and-kaboodle very attractive. This is hypothetical but I think it's reasonable.

Cisco

[Enderandrew]

Cisco already provides phones, PBX, etc. and tools to mix your voicemail and e-mail into one system. Buying an IM company allows them to offer voicemail, e-mail, and IM on one platform. However they could have just used Jabber without buying it, unless they intend to end the open source licensing.

Re:Cisco

[gehrehmee]

Or if they just wanted a good way to get engineers who know their way around a particular family of technology, and who have a successful name backing them up...

Re:Cisco

[Randle_Revar]

>unless they intend to end the open source licensing.
Jabber XCP is not OSS

Re:Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco already has a presence product as part of it's unified communications offering. I think it's based on SIP and SIMPLE, though, rather than XMPP. Perhaps this acquisition was in recognition of the prevalence of XMPP as a standard. In this light, I think the announcement bodes welll for all XMPP based products.

Interestingly, the Jabber XCP appears to have been expressly engineered and marketed to integrate nicely with other Cisco products, such as WebEx and MeetingPlace. So maybe none of this should really come as a surprise.

Re:Cisco

[gjws]

I believe Cisco would be looking at Jabber for its intra-domain federation capabilities and basic IM functionality. Today Cisco can integrate with Microsoft Office Communicator and Sametime, and they also have their own client, Personal Communicator. It is simple to link seperate companies / domain using SIP but it's actually quite tough to link multiple platforms within the same company. This may sound uncommon but it actually happens quite often believe it or not. On the IM front, if you have ever used the IM client in Cisco's Personal Communicator you will understand why this acquisition makes sense. The current Cisco offering lacks basic functionality, such as multi party chat, and as such is certainly not ready for the large enterprise. With the purchase of Jabber they can bolt on this type of functionality quite quickly. Could they develop this functionality themselves? Undoubtedly, but it would take longer and almost certainly be less stable and feature rich for than the competition for several years.

Re:Cisco

[Specter]

It's more likely that they are unsatisfied with their existing presence/messaging options (Unified Communicator and/or WebEx AIMPro) and felt they needed to build up the portfolio.

I imagine there are many enterprises telling them: "Hey, can't we just have an application independent presence engine and not have it tied to whatever flavor of the month you've got for your IM?"

Re:Cisco

[ksd1337]

They probably want to release a proprietary version more integrated with their existing platform, however.

Just to stab Avaya a little bit more

[quetwo]

At Avaya's latest trade conference this spring (Avaya is Cisco's largest competitor in the PBX/VoIP/Video scape), Avaya introduced a very large partnership with Jabber Inc., to help with presence solutions (Avaya's presence solution, while based on SIMPLE/SIP, is not very well supported outside the SIP world). They were expected to release their product sometime this fall, that would allow true presence aggregation and integration with their many VoIP and Video products.

As of this morning, these partnerships are dead, along with these revolutionary products. Official word is "This acquisition will not harm Avaya or Nortel's existing presence products, but further development on partnership products will no longer continue."

I guess Cisco won't fall behind in this realm after all.

When in doubt, fork off.

[Jane Q. Public]

You can always fork. It would be silly/stupid for Cisco to try to retroactively change licensing terms. Of course, it would not be the first stupid thing they had ever done... nevertheless, they are not known for such.

Re:When in doubt, fork off.

[Randle_Revar]

How does stuff like this get post and modded insightful, when there are already numerous post stating that:

1. the protocol is open
2. OSS licenses can't be retroactively revoked
3. The Jabber Inc product, Jabber XCP, is not and never has been Open Source.
4. There are 3 or 4 major OSS xmpp servers already, and several smaller ones (and none of these have been bought).

Re:When in doubt, fork off.

[TheRaven64]

1. the protocol is open

The core protocol, anyway. Being based on XML, it allows arbitrary extensions. Apple extended it in a few ways and didn't document them, breaking compatibility. Google extended them and did document their changes.

3. The Jabber Inc product, Jabber XCP, is not and never has been Open Source.

It's not even very good. It's less feature-complete and less scalable than eJabberd.

4. There are 3 or 4 major OSS xmpp servers already, and several smaller ones (and none of these have been bought).

Jabberd is unmaintained, Jabberd2 is a mess, OpenIM is probably okay but getting Java working on my server was too much effort for me to seriously evaluate it. eJabberd is a very nice piece of software though. I was slightly surprised Google implemented their own rather than using it (since it's designed to scale to very large clusters), but it's probably due to their legendary fear of languages that aren't C++ or Python (eJabberd is written in Erlang).

Re:When in doubt, fork off.

[makomk]

There's also djabberd, which is written in Perl and apparently scales well, but unfortunately it's rather lacking in features.

Re:When in doubt, fork off.

[Randle_Revar]

>1.

true

>4.

OpenIM? I was thinking of OpenFire. Jabberd2 may be a mess, but I think it still counts as major. And it is a separate C++ codebase for Jabber that could be fixed up if anyone need to/wanted to.

anyway there is a complete list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XMPP_server_software

There are more than I thought.

I nearly feinted when I read that

[hardaker]

... But primarily because I misread Jabber as "Juniper".

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know! But when they do, my company will still be selling their management software, and it will support both versions. And I shall have another paycheck.

The obvious counterpunch

[charlesbakerharris]

Mr. T buys back Jibber to keep Cisco from monopoly.

Cisco to Challenge IBM, Microsoft in Enterprise

[voltheir]

Between acquiring WebEx, Postpath, and now Jabber, it looks like Cisco is priming themselves to challenge the major players in the unified enterprise collaboration space. Proprietary will continue to dominate FOSS in the enterprise for the foreseeable future - this is the reality of the situation.

How about...

[Jane Q. Public]

when it is first? There were only about 20 comments total when I posted this.

Remember that this is a threaded-format forum. The number of replies above this post has nothing to do with when my comment was posted.

So your "already" statement is in error: they weren't "already" there.

Re:How about...

[Randle_Revar]

I read the thread at several different times and I guess I missed your comment, because I didn't see it until my last pass over the thread. Sorry about that.

Smart Move

[Spazmania]

With a few tweaks to make it acceptable to the enterprise instant messaging market, Cisco has a very salable product. Companies have been trying to kill off the AIM and Yahoo IM clients for some time because of the security risk they pose. They haven't succeeded because the enterprise IM clients don't meet an appropriate standard of quality and don't interact with anybody else's IM product.

Why Jabber.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they have the best "enterprise oriented" XMPP products. Think about stuff like corperate deployment and support.. but mostly compliance with data retention regulation and such.

Will fit in well with

[Anonymous Coward]

Jibber

Re:Hmmm

[jav1231]

Kinda surprised I was modded "Flamebait." As someone who has supported non-switch/router related apps from Cisco I can tell you that things like this can be problematic. They simply don't compare to their core offerings.