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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.
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?
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I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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?
There's no place like
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.