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

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!!!

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?

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

[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: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.

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: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.

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.

I nearly feinted when I read that

[hardaker]

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

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: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?

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.