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AOL Jilts Open Source
Cerb writes "AOL seems to have retracted the specs to its TiK protocol." The lead paragraph of the ZDNet story Cerb sent in says, "The controversy surrounding America Online Inc. and instant
messaging has spilled over into the realm of open source, raising
fundamental questions about open-source licenses and commercial
vendors' use of them." Could they do the same to Mozilla? A scary thought.
For one thing, the AIM protocols were published but kept proprietary. TiK, GAIM and all the other alternative AIM clients were bound by a restrictive license on use of the protocol. Mozilla, on the other hand, is protected by a self-protecting open license much in the same way as GNU software.
Secondly, AOL's main intent behind the temporary withdrawl of the open-source AIM clients is to impose order on what has been lax enforcement of their license terms in recent months. Besides the perhaps peevish restriction on misuse of the protocol for cracking and address-harvesting apps, AOL has a perfectly valid interest in preserving their ad-revenue stream on the mainstream clients. A few thousand Unix users running adless (and kinda crappy) clone clients without ads is harmless and keeps hackers happy. Mass-market clones that do so and insert their own ads (see MSN Messenger) are another story.
Companies like AOL, on the other hand, naturally try to finance the servers through advertising and are understandably wary of third party clients.
Ideally, IM service would be provided by ISPs, just like they provide SMTP service. But ISPs have little incentive to provide any kind of IM service until there is a large demand for it, and that won't happen until a protocol has been established.
A distributed advertising protocol linked to chat, similar to the way banner ads have worked with companies like LinkExchange in the past, might be a short-term solution. Once the service is off the ground, it may then simply become a must-have for ISPs.
Rob never posts my crap. I post somthing like this before I leave for a trip, get back 4 days later, and he posts a different story about the same thing.. who cares that articles have been written now. I posted that it was gone and off their page befre they released a statement. This is the third time I've posted, and they never put it on the page.. *Suggestion:* make a link on the left with all the others where people can view waiting to be reviewed and/or rejected articles, although that'd require more bandwidth.
- funnyguy
Us early risers (*groan*) get to make the first intelligent post, it seems. (Being patient through the poor performance and such helps too.) But anyways, AOL's doing the logical and intelligent thing.
In the middle of this messaging war, anything that's open source is like a giant bullseye painted on AOL's back. I doubt that AOL is doing this permanently. This is simply a measure that needs to be taken to protect themselves against Microsoft currently. I can forgive that.
AOL isn't blocking TOC/TiK clients, they're not actively attempting to create specific interopability problems either. This is a clear sign that they're not out to destroy TOC/TiK, but simply attempting to do damage control as quickly as possible.
Wait till the war is over. TOC/TiK will be back, rest assured. AOL's already realized that the open source community is one of their best and most powerful allies. But Microsoft is one of their worst enemies, and any information that MS can get is ammunition for use against them.
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
your company here.
shelby != ford
...should be ignored unless they are useful in other contexts. A client that has no use outside a non-open server should not be considered open source but rather a marketing gimmick.
Obviously, a client that could be used as a base for a completely open source solution is a different matter. Beware of big companies with limited open source projects.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Although what they're doing is bad for the open source community I don't think they'll do the same with Mozilla. They need to produce a small, fast standards based browser if they want to compete with MS. Although they are currently using IE they'll probably change to Mozilla when it's ready and their agreement with MS is over.
Even if they did many people already have the source code and continue developing it (there are still some non-Netscape developers working on it, although not having Netscape's contribution would slow the project down). Mozilla needs more people to help track down bugs, if you visit www.mozilla.org and try out the nightly builds you'll be a great help to the project.
BTW if anyone does have the AOL IM code and it was under GRL like the article says you're perfectly entitled to make it available for download under the terms of GPL even if AOL has retracted it.
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The way MS and Yahoo are saying that they want open protocols is such a joke, when they aren't even willing to open up their own.
I can't even get them to get me minimal information that would let me extend GTKYahoo to all of the new capabilities. I have been able to do some of the features, but others require the new login method, which I haven't been able to figure out how to generate.
Maybe it doesn't push ads now, that MSIM has like no marketshare. But if they succeed in getting marketshare, I'm sure MS will capitalize on it.
Here's how I see it:
M$ is once again jumping on a bandwagon after it has proven to be a moneymaker, and they're trying to use AOL's own servers against them.
Once they get enough marketshare, they'll simply add new "enhancements" that will be hard for AOL to duplicate using their networks, include it in future OEM releases of Windows, and gain marketshare unfairly, with their Windows monopoly advantage.
Without the false "Open Standards" push, and connectivity to AOL Instant Messenger, they run a risk of people installing the AOL IM Client even if the MSIM client comes with Windows, so they can talk to their AOL friends.
Microsoft needs to be able to make MSIM interoperate with AOL IM, or their whole strategy won't work.
The fact that M$ owns 90%+ of the OEM Operating System Pre-installs makes the whole thing tilted in Microsoft's favor. In anything to do with the Internet, that's what they're banking on.
They're too easy to read, especially after all those trials showing their business practices.
One relatively unrelated note here:
EFNET has gotten better lately as far as the script-kiddies, since it's much harder to get illegitimate channel operator access even if you resort to flooding servers, flooding clients, or the like. It's still possible in many cases, but with a large enough channel, and enough bots, it's next to impossible.
While I'm the spokesperson for EFNET , I will agree that most channels on EFNET are crap. Then again, most channels on most servers are crap. You gotta find what's good and stick to there.
As for IM versus IRC, IRC wins out. It's a lot more 'underground', in many cases.
What I __WOULD__ LOVE to see, is some encrypted IRC servers for the major networks, and some clients to boot. Preferably 128 bit or better encryption.
Even better would be to be able to share keys in private chats and among members of a channel, and keep even the server operators from being able to monitor the connections (since that's not what they do anyway) at any point anywhere in the chain.
This would be a big boon to IRC IMHO, but it might be painted by the media as an area of complete lawlessness since there would absolutely no way the government can monitor conversations between people via the internet. We're talking no phone taps, nothing like that possible. This would be the first completely secure form of communication for large numbers of people.
I could see the government making something like the scenario above impossible to achieve.
A new IM protocol can catch on in the same way that ICQ caught on in the first placing... by harnessing the power of teen chat. The client binaries have to be small, tight, and easy to send to your friends by IRC DCC or email. The user interface has to be cute... and how about *less clunky* at the same time. Free servers have to be in place, and somebody has to pay for that bandwidth. Maybe the chat client should include a link back to the server's web page so the server operator can put ads there, or something. Just an idea. There has to be a way to get free servers going.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
GNU products in many cases are the glue that holds unixes together since we can have basic system commands that work the same across architectures. Less training costs, more productivity.
Can you give examples where GNU products have stagnated? Where there's a real need for a version that has some feature that doesn't already exist, but isn't being made? Heck, if someone needs a feature that's not implemented badly enough, they'll code it themselves.
GNU products in general don't stagnate.
...whether you can use someone elses resources *without* their permission. Say for instance that a silk-screening shop created some really cool software to automate their shop. They decide to make it GPL.
Now, does that mean that I can use the software in my shop? Yep, I'd guess so. But does it mean that I can just walk in to their shop and start a batch of shirt's to sell in my retail store? What? No? Why not? Their software is open source, isn't it? But does that mean that they'll refuse to let the local LUG use their shop to print shirts for their members? Maybe they won't have a problem "donating" a few shirts. Does that have anything to do with open source though? Does that give me the right to freely go in their and print shirts for my retail store because the LUG can? Well, what's the difference, huh? I mean, how could anyone be so inconsistant. Shame on them...
It's the same with AOL. Sure they can make their protocol open source. Yep, they can even let others come in and use their servers. But that doen't obligate them to let everyone freely help themselves to others resources.
MS can use the AIM protocol for all AOL cares, I bet. But on their *own* servers, not AOL's. Otherwise, MS can get off their behinds and start negotiating a contract with AOL to use AOL's servers to host their Instant Messaging service.
In time we'll have a multi-vendor IM protocol that allows a bunch of servers to interopolate, just like e-mail does now. When that happens, AOL has indicted that they will support it. But until then, MS needs to pay up...
Otherwise, I can't wait until the local video rental store starts using open source software to run the store. Free Video rental, anyone?
-BrentSeriously though, with a tiny bit of hacking, you can turn a standard, run of the mill IRC server into something that will provide Instant Messaging services for a client. The pieces are there, just put them together.
AOL has made no efforts to recall Tik/TOC/whatever, they haven't been sending threatening letters, they haven't even been making specific efforts to break Tik/TOC compatibility with AIM.
All AOL has done is 1)taken down one of their own a web pages; 2) tried to stop Microsoft and Yahoo client software from operating across AOL's messaging servers.
I disagree with both decisions, but it isn't a big deal. In the first case, IT'S JUST A FREAKING WEB PAGE!!! In the second case, if Microsoft set up a special, say, Windows OS support network and stopped non-IE browsers from accessing it, I'd be a bit miffed, but it IS their network.
TOC (the protocol that TiK uses, the protocol that AOL released specs for) is a pidgin, text version of the binary OSCAR protocol that is used by the "mainstream" AIM client. (AOL has a gateway box somewhere that speaks TiK on one side and OSCAR on the other. All this effort is because OSCAR is a much more powerful protocol and you could do lots of interesting stuff that AOL wasn't quite intending yet if you had the specs to it.)
Also, OSCAR uses a weird, AOL-internal application framework similar to what's used in the AOL client. (In the beta version, you can actually pop up a console window and avail yourself to AIM's command language, complete with aliases and other random "features.") It's based on dynamically-loaded modules that talk to each other according to a special message-passing architexture.
This would lead me to think that any code contributed to TiK would be of limited utility to the main AIM developers. No temptation to violate the GPL.
[The information in this post comes from, umm, staring at the AIM login screen really hard and meditating. Yeah, that's the ticket.]
Instant messaging should work roughly like mail: distributed and ubiquitous, without ties to advertising or a single vendor. ISPs should provide the necessary infrastructure just like they provide SMTP services (in fact, some mailers have support for instant messaging, but that hasn't caught on in an ISP-based world).
I wouldn't blame AOL for not building such an infrastructure--it just has nothing to do with their business. The open question is whether the newly commercialized Internet actually allows for new protocols like a vendor independent IM protocol to catch on and become ubiquitous in the same way SMTP, HTTP, and many of the other classic protocols caught on.
People here just don't get it. There will be no test of the GPL in this case. Microsoft is not using the GPL'd protocol; they're using one they reverse-engineered, the same one the official AIM client uses. Also, even though they GPL'd Tik, they are under no obligation to continue distributing it, since they are the sole copyright owners. What the GPL means is that if you have the source, you can keep distributing it, not that if AOL once distributed the source they can't stop. So there is no violation of the GPL. MS is highjacking AOL's servers, but that's it.
the program you speak of is already in progress of being built. it's called Jabber, and its approach to servers is very much like you describe; the servers communicate with each other in a decentralized manner, and they eventually expect for ISPs to host jabber servers the way they do mail servers now.
the interesting thing is that they are building the capability for the jabber servers to connect to the ICQ and AIM servers, or anything else for that matter, and then translate those messages into jabber's XML format and send them to the jabber user. so you connect to the jabber network, but are also on ICQ and AIM despite being connected to one server..
Jabber is also, btw, open-source.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is really pissy news... All these companys either don't get it or don't want others to get it.. It is not about them anymore, their time is over....
Can we all stand together and say, Fuck'Em.
We have plenty of open source chat/messaging protocols and software pieces without their shoddy contributions...
Just incase you don't know where we are headed (and god am i glad to see someone put all this down in a well stated manner - for i sure couldn't) check this out on first monday, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright... Damn good reading...
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Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com
Marques Johansson
(In case you don't know, a munchkin is someone who works for a particular company and posts FUD etc. under an alias. This is a known Microsoft tactic, already practiced in the war against OS/2 years ago).
And if this Reuters report posted on Usenet is true, Microsoft actually confirms that it was a munchkin of theirs, but they "didn't authorise his smear attempt".
What's ironic that that guy at Microsoft decided to contact Richard Smith of all people, since he is well known for revealing secrets in Microsoft(!) software, such as the Registration Wizard and IDs stamped on Office documents. Bad luck for the Microsoft munchkin because... Richard Smith then discovered that the sender used the Yahoo mail system and had set up the account that day. Apparently, the sender was not aware that Yahoo includes IP addresses, which Smith used to trace the message back to Microsoft.
What does all this show?
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
All the GPL gaurantees is that source is distributed with the binary or source is available for nominal cost if you distribute only the binary. Anyone with the TiK source can redistribute it under the GPL, but AOL has no requirement to keep their servers open to outside users, other than to maintain goodwill.
You can argue against their actions and their motives. You can call them misguided or even evil, but recognize that they have every right to do what they are doing even though they "did the right thing" and released TiK under the GPL. If you don't like the control they exert over the instant messaging arena use IRC or roll your own.
Don't think for one minute that AOL does not understand and desire the control that owning the servers gives them and that they would give them up to please you. Don't expect the god of Open Source (all hail his name) protect you from your own greed. Yes greed. You want to use a service that has significant maintenance costs without reciprocating or paying because it is the most convienient to you. You are willing to blind yourself to the fact that you are in fact paying for this service by making it ubiquitous and locking yourself into a proprietary solution on proprietary servers. Don't cry now. Open source is an excellent hedge against commercialization in many contexts, but where there is money spent, there must be money made so either all parties participate equally, as in SMTP or you pay the piper.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"