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France Telecom To Support Jabber 110

Posted by timothy from the one-ring-to-bing-them-all dept.
AmX writes: "I've just seen on Jabber.com that France Telecom is going to invest $7 million in Jabber.com in exchange for a 23% equity interest in the company. Nice to see a big company supporting this technology. The details are here." With that kind of funding, perhaps Jabber really will become the next big thing. Not getting locked out of proprietary messaging systems would be a benefit to everyone. (Psss, don't forget jabber.org, too.)
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France Telecom to support Jabber More

France Telecom to support Jabber

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  • Not the first to embrace Jabber. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    VA Linux Systems Open Source Development Network and Jabber.com Enter Into Distribution Agreement http://www.jabber.com/news/release_102400.shtml

  • Ah, the price of capital these days... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    $7 million for a 23% stake in Jabber? I'm not sure who's ripping who off.

  • Good luck (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last week I put a jabber system live at work. We've several offices dotted around the world, all linked via VPN and needed to offer an internal only alternative to the likes of ICQ,etc. Having originally been told to use Netmeeting and discovered it's hopeless at working NATNAT I rolled out jabber which works perfectly, runs on much lower spec hardware and hasn't cost a penny. The one minor problem I had was resolved by logging onto a jabber conference where somebody helped me diagnose the problem there and then. Just another example of why our systems are predominantly open source based.

  • Re:Reason for everything (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >>and which happens to be just bigger than tiny dwarves such as Cisco and Nortel combined. Niche markets, I'm telling you!

    From Yahoo. Market cap for Alcatel is 41 billion with 2.4 Billion in Cash, CSCO is 147 billion with 5.5 Billion in cash and 12 billion in investments making a billion a quarter (Ignore current downturn). Nortel is 51.225B. So using French calculations. You are absolutley correct.

  • Re:Why IM? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.

    Jabber.com is just a company that's trying to bring jabber to the desktop market. The server software and many of the clients are written by volunteers, and the protocol itself was developed by volunteers. Even if that weren't the case, there's no way that FT can "take the source away" because the source is already available under an open source license.

  • Re:Want to see good C? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Java version? They're still waiting for it to load.

    Oops, crashed! Let's try that one more time...

  • jabber.com vs jabber.org (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:42PM (#236599)
    Some things to keep in mind if you're a company thinking about using jabber (and I think jabber com/org is a good thing):

    1. jabber.com hired pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers.
    2. The jabber.org guys changed away from GPL to jabber.com's own JOSL ("jabber open source license").
    3. It is unclear (to me) if you contribute to jabber.org how/if your work will be pulled into jabber.com.
    4. jabber.com is the "commercial" version of jabber.org. You pay them for it and they give various kinds of support. They've supposedly done alot of testing on it.
    5. jabber.com is a completely different codebase than jabber.org. (for example .com uses pthreads and .org uses pth (different thread libs)). The .com people are trying to add clustering and scalability that .org's code base doesn't have. I'm not sure if they're giving that back to .org
    6. I'm skeptical as to how much .org will continue to thrive (as opposed to before .com) now that its main developers are working for .com on a different code base.
    7. As of a month ago, the jabber.com server didn't support the msn/yahoo/aim connections because that code is contained in "transports" modules designed to work with jabber.org's vastly different pth-based code base. And my understanding was it would be a "couple of quarter" before they're in. When you try out jabber.com's open server and see that it does appear to connect to msn/yahoo/aim, the way they are doing it is they are running a jabber.org server side-by-side with the jabber.com server and doing a jabber-jabber intermediate transport (ie the .com server is relying on the .org server to do the msn/yahoo/aim connections). I'm saying this is good or bad, but it is definitely a factor if you're considering buying a jabber.com server and support to allow your customers to connect to aim/yahoo/msn.
    8. jabber.com won't sell support for aim/msn/yahoo because they can't "indemnify" it (or whatever) - they can't supposedly guarantee the connectivity. While it is true they can't guarantee the connectivity (until aim/yahoo/msn license it) it seems to me they can still sell it while explicitly stating they can't guarantee it. (I believe Odigo does - odigo.com is another IM solution that sells server, client, custom IM stuff).

  • Yeah, I've been playing with Jabber for about 3 weeks now (running our own server with AIM/ICQ/MSN/etc. support -- whee!). I've been playing around, making a Jabber bot just to play around and get a feel for things, and I have to say, not only is the code nice, the protocol is one of the cleanest I've seen. It's really nice to work with. IM may be a fairly simple idea, but the Jabber group has definitely done a very clean implementation.

  • And, don't forget about JabberCentral [jabbercentral.org] -- a great place for Jabber news and Jabber downloads.

    Alex Bischoff
  • I suspect their investors will probably slap their wrists for saying how much equity they bought, that is normally highly confidencial.

    --

  • :-) (Score:2)

    by Sanity ( 1431 )
    yes i sure would.

    --

  • They want to make sure that people will be able to chat in French, so that the French language isn't overwhelmed and subsumed by English.
  • who holds 50% share of stock in FT.....umm the Frog govt. So just maybe it does have somthing to do with them. But maybe you're just an ignorant dork....
  • The ADSL market in the US and the rest of the world IS A TINY NICHE market, sorry. Hell 56k users outnumber DSL subscribers on a order of 100.
    DSL vendors in the US are dropping like flies to the CABLE Monoliths. I am a DSL user and even I can see that. Just a show of hands how many people are in DSL range vs say CABLE or (*sob) 56k ??
  • you make some compelling arguments for looking at this thing thanks for the info....

  • I took a look at Jabber after seeing this article as it might fulfill some corporate needs (I've been looking for an intra-company IM for a while: Something that allows us an IM system without needing to use external servers or route data externally) so first I looked for the server, hopefully to run on a Windows 2000 server. "Contact our sales department at...". Any company that isn't willing to display simple prices for software products earns a big fat slimeball marker. "You wanna know how much it costs? I dunno...how much you got?"

    Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."

  • Quote:
    <blockquote><i>actually, msn im has the biggest number of users. second is aol im.</i></blockquote>
    I had no idea that msn is more used than aim. Can you give us a source for this?

  • Control of Jabber (Score:4)

    by unsung ( 10704 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:30PM (#236610) Journal

    Quote:
    ...will call for active participation by FTT on the Jabber.com Board of Directors and involvement by various France Telecom affiliates in the guidance of Jabber's technology direction.
    Strange, I always thought that jabber.ORG defined the technology direction (rather than jabber.COM). I am happy for jabber.com though. $7 mil can definitely help keep them going for a while if used wisely.

    To me, Jabber's strength comes from the fact that it's a distributed server system and not centralized. No one company controls the technology direction. Every company who implements the jabber server has complete control to their own userbase, and all devices that implement the jabber protocol should be able to talk with each other - this means that if we have IM implemented on all sorts of devices - Palm, Computer, Cell phones, ... whatever, you don't have to go through one company such as AOL... get permission, pay license fees, etc...

    If a large company such as Microsoft... or even a consumer electronics company such as Sony steps in to support Jabber, it would go a loooong way to standardizing it. They don't even have to invest like FT... just step in and say, "We like this standard and will implement it in our future products."
  • Hmm. I installed it and everyone at my office was able to connect with no trouble at all. Could this be the dread pebcak error raising it's ugly head once again? It seems to work its way into every aspect of computing these days. I wish the Kernel group would do something about it.
  • 50% of the French own a cellular phone and it is still growing..

    But WAP is currently a big failure: only a few percent of the phone are WAP enabled, and only a few percent of those who own a WAP-enabled phone use it..
    Why? Big connecting time, slow connection, price (you pay for the time you use the service), small screen, few interesting services.

    GPRS will start quite soon, it is going to have always-on connection and a different pricing model: you pay for the amount of data not the connection time.
    It will still have slow connections (at least at the beginning) though.

    I don't know if it will be a success or not, wait and see..
  • I doubt it. I installed jabber myself, tried to install the transports and found they wouldn't compile under anything other than Linux, and the transports on jabber.com and jabber.org were rarely running, much less working properly when they were. There were improper notifications of people logging or logging out - you'd send a message to someone who wasn't online and never get an error, although their status was still online. Worse yet, you'd get disconnected and never actually know.

    The clients are all either astoundingly buggy(gabber) or extremely ugly(WinJab). The protocol is poorly documented - ask anyone who's tried to write a client. I did, and just couldn't find the information I needed to get more advanced features working.

    Don't get me wrong, Jabber has great potential, and I tried really hard to use it and advocate it, but it's been far overhyped and has a looong way to go before it's usable for a mainstream audience(much like Linux, IMO). Eventually I gave up and used gaim, since it supports all the protocols and is fairly stable - and I got sick of telling my friends to use jabber and then having to make excuses for why things broke constantly.

    To sum up: if you want a decent IM system with a future, use Jabber. If you want to communicate with 90% of the other people in the world using an IM system, stick with gaim or everybuddy.

    -lx
  • I've only played with icq under windows and gaim, but the main reason I shied away from it was the not-quite-instant messenger part of it - the method being more like e-mail rather than chat, and one of the worst-looking UIs I'd seen since Lotus Notes. I tend to like AIM better as it's simple, compact, and to the point.

    That's just me tho.

    -lx
  • Ummm.... Why is this -1 offtopic? This is one of the most on-topic comments posted so far.. *sigh*
  • The coolest thing about Jabber isn't the ability to IM clients or the XML routing of their server. It's that it may finally be the directory service that will tie a string of independant services together. Anything will be able to send some sort of message to your directory listing and it will find its way to get to you, while you'll easily be able to have your software parse said message and let it determine if it reaches you or not. E-mail is the bastardization of a concept harkening back to the mainframe days. I send a message which gets stored in some form of memory for you to read later. This was then extended for use on the internet. The problem is that you have to login into a particular server to get your messages which by nature aren't realtime. Jabber/IM/... take the concept of delivering information a step further. Rather than get stored messages from a server, I can be automagically routed my messages by the server. Not only can data be routed to me but the sender doesn't need to know anything about my physical location. All of the client interfacing is done blind, only the server really needs to know anything about the clients. IM is only the tip of the iceberg; P2P sharing could easily incorporate Jabber as their person finding system.
    Say you write a Jabber deamon that runs on Unix systems. People start writing Jabber modules for it to parse incoming XML. One of those XML packets could be a message going out to WidgetSoft users that there is an update out for WidgetWare and provides information to negotiate a network connection to a server to download the update. Jabber's got the potential to be a whole new way to get your system talking to other systems. Thats why the XML aspect is cool and important, IMing is nothing compared to the stuff you can make it do.
  • in telecomunications alone, French contribution include for example a big chunk of the development of ATM and GSM technologies (France Telecom). Alcatel is the world biggest maker of ADSL hardware. The European branch of W3C is based in France. Lots of work on IPv6 was done here, etc.
  • FT promoted the Minitel in the early 80s, which is not, I believe, the time when the Internet for the masses started to take off.

    The Minitel generated a huge online business with profitable companies, whose total revenue exceded the whole world's ebusiness revenue until 1997.

    FT realized that the Minitel was doomed in 1995, when they decided to cancel the presentation of a next generation terminal in the CeBit. This is the very same time when Microsoft realized that a proprietary MSN was doomed.

    Today, NTT Docomo is pushing the Japanese governement for a clearance to launch a "non mobile" version of its extremely successful wireless online service i-mode, that would be dubbed L-mode. L-mode business model is exactly that of the Minitel.

  • So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.

    Not that I know much about jabber either, but you certainly doesn't sound like one that has studied it!

    This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.

    Now, who is pulling something out his ass here?!

    FT can't take the source and run away with it - the code is open source!

    Do you have some secret agenda? Do you work for AOL?

    The goal of Jabber is to create an open (and better) standard for IM instead of having multible standards as we have now. Furthermore Jabber isn't limited to just chat, it could be used in a lot of other places, only limited by your imagination.

    Read this [jabbercentral.com] if you would like to read a bit about what I mean.


    Greetings Pointwood
  • What was the name of the terminal system that France was promoting when the Internet started to take off? They wanted to put one of these text-only devices in every home with a phone. They did chat and email and provided phone number lookups. But they also delayed the Internet in France.

    I fear that the French promoting Jabber might just be the kiss of death.
  • > Want to see good C?

    I thought the French all programmed in Système D.

    --
  • You should checkout www.jabber.org to see if the open source server fits your needs. There are lots of OS clients as well. Otherwise, pick up the phone and call. Many enterprise level software solutions have more complex licensing schemes that can't easily be translated to a simple price tag.
  • Interested in security? KiT [abelsson.com] is yet another IM system but with built in encryption.. supports it's own protocol, aim, icq and soon jabber (as soon as i get around to implementing it :)

    It's still very alpha and a lot of features aren't implemented, but KiT [abelsson.com] works reasonably well.

    Feel free to try it out.. :)

    -henrik

  • It depends on the flat rate you've bought. I'm currently paying $35 for three hours on two (joined) lines. Above this, it's a proportional rate (SMS is $.15/message).

    Local phone is $12 month (line) plus $.1/3 minutes ; I don't use their long distance (>30 km) service (the telco I use is $.03 /minute country-wide, and $.08/min to call anywhere in the EU, USA and Canada. FT is between 3 and 10 times more expensive).

  • I know we've thought of using an IM client to handle internal office messaging before.

    ATM, we basically all use WinPopup. Which has very few features, a clunky interface and simply doesn't work if the person isn't running it at the time. The message doesn't get queued, it actually gets erroneously reported as delivered... Considering we're looking at overstretched 9x boxes, that happens.

    An internal IM server would be lovely, if only I could find the details on how and the time to do it :)
  • You can use Jabber to talk to MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ and (when they're not being total dicks) AIM.

    So, now you don't have to run a seperate client for each. At worst, you have to run Gaim and a Jabber client (e.g. gabber).
  • But, they want a computer user to be able to send to a cell-phone through IM. Or, for a cell-phone user to send to a Yahoo!, MSN or ICQ user. Of course, if AOL got off their butts, you'd be able to send to an AIM user as well, but for right now, they'll be busted... oh well, get a real ISP/IMP.
  • Cool, I had no idea. When I went poking, the interface for adding non AOL accounts was not too obvious, but I did set it up. I may end up using gaim because I mostly want Jabber access, but gaim is doing the AOL thing well, and so I may get my AOL access through that.
  • Jabber.com caters to corporations who want to implement instant messaging internally. You'd be surprised how many companies have approached them. They develop server extensions and taylor clients to the corporations' needs. They have several business deals in the making, but the specifics aren't public information yet. Just take a look at Jabber.com's customer list [jabber.com] for those deals which are public information.

    Basically, Jabber.com wants to cater to corporations who want to use Jabber and also employ several of the core hackers on the Jabber.org (Open Source) Jabber project. There are also other companies forming which will be involved in the creation of Jabber and Jabber-related services/projects, so Jabber.com won't have absolute control over the project. (And it doesn't currently anyway, there are many of us (myself included) who work on Jabber-related things but are not employed by Jabber.com)

  • Well there are really usefull functionnalities, that can be both powerfull yet simple to use. Then there's the bloat : not so usefull to completely useless thing, that make the interface very complex. I think bloat is more about the user interface that the value of the functionnalities (at least when talking about IM)


  • Cool ass news especially when things looked a tad bit downhill for *things open sourced* (Slackware news/Indrema/etc) for a second or two. Now they focus on their own servers so no one can block them (which should be one of the top priorities for them). Its nice to know that things in dotcomland aren't as bad as we would make them to be.. Sure its a bit shitty but it goes to show things do get rosy.

    Well now we have to sit back and see how AOL will react this since now in theory, the company is profitable which means AOL can pursue legal avenues to take against Jabber should their clients continue to use their services (bandwidth/servers let's not start a threadwar)




  • Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."

    Ok I don't really follow you here. Many commercial products have an open source port to them for the Linux/BSD clients, so I wish you could've been more specific so I could try to provide some insightful answer for you.

    Anyways to your other post about searching for an internal solution for your company, maybe one of the reasons why they probably don't have any pricing is because it is a free program. I'm sure if you needed a specially ported client they'd be willing to talk a price. It would be shooting yourself in the foot as a programmer to simply throw a price on a product you haven't created (should they need to create a specially written client) so thats a possibility.

    A non routeable solution you could look into if you want is an IM client StarMedia uses for their network. Its something similar to ICQ except a company created it for them. They paid for the servers, and both programs and server software. I wish I could remember where I read the article about the company that did it for them but that was a while back.


  • Answers 101 (Score:3)

    by joq ( 63625 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:47PM (#236633) Homepage Journal

    Imagine a network solely to be used for say... College Students working on medical research who need to interact with each other but don't want to have to access the internet via the normal channels, email, forums, etc., they could have a client specifically created by Jabber to cater to their needs.

    Imagine the Genome research companies all over the world sharing information via those same routes, they too could have a specially created client for them which could do things like fetch information via an XML add on for them. Example, CometSystems [cometsystems.com] has a neat "smart cursor" based tool which allows any word in a page regardless if they have a hyperlink, and pull up information on whatever was selected. So imagine if Jabber did the same only it catered to no one but the Genome companies.

    Thats where corporations would come in, to add revenue. There are many more instances of corporate uses I could think of for them to make money off the client. Make an SSL based secure transaction client to interact with Amazon and other vendors, so if someone sent their friend a URL for music, the user would be automatically be directed (should they clink a special link) to a vendor to purchase that record, or book, etc., there are plenty of ways to make cash with it.

    All your base are belong to Dubya [antioffline.com]


  • Effectively, jabber is controlled by jabber.COM since many of the people at the core of jabber (jer, temas, etc) are involved with jabber.com (I cant remember how. Jabber 'officials' are currently discussing starting up a Jabber Foundation with members who get to vote on things. It apparently will cost upwards of $1000 to join (I saw something suggesting it may be based on size of organization)... there will also be limits on what percentage of votes one organization can get. We'll see how it goes :) Just remember that some of the people at jabber.com are the people who started jabber, so it's sort of okay for people at jabber.com to control jabber's direction :)
  • - Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM

    Sounds like a good idea, but how much functionality are you looking for? And realistically, how much functionality can you provide over IM?

    Games. (Notice how many people play snake on the morning commute?). Streaming news and info. (Wouldn't it be nice not to have to check /. every 1/2 for the latest story when it just IM's you?). Train times (You train is 10 minutes late. i.e no need to rush this morning. Hey in the UK this happens alot...)

    - Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that

    So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.

    Yes, its open. and there are no licensing costs. How many people have mobile devices today? In the UK it is _over_50% of the population. that adds up to a lot of licensing costs for a telco who is alreadt burdened with a 7 Billion pound bill for the 3G license...

    - Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves

    First, it's doubtful that 3rd parties will develop anything for Jabber just because it is Open. Second, FT doesn't gain anything by donating money to Jabber, at least anything they couldn't have usurped without paying.

    They will if the market is big enough. If the European 3G commitee said they were adopting jabber as a IM standard devlopers would flock to it in an instant. If they see the market they will develop and by promoting it FT helps make a free protocol the standard. - And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned Because you're pulling these reasons out of your ass? No, actually I work in the industry, I'm a Sales Engineer for Sync and Browsing software for mobile devices. Everyday I talk to the likes of Orange, Vodafone, BT and Large Enterprises looking to deploy mobile devices to their workforces. Trust me, you have only seen the beginning of mobile services, alot of the stuff Telcos are talking about is crap, but some of it will stick...

  • Re:Why IM? (Score:4)

    by barnaclebarnes ( 85340 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:41PM (#236636) Homepage
    - Because current messaging is getting old. SMS is excellent for simple messaging between phones but thats about it. - Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM. - Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that. - Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves - And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned.

  • Ha! (Score:3)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @04:18PM (#236637) Journal
    This isn't news. The French have been jabbering away at the rest of the world since time immemorial, and I'm sure they've been jabbering away on French Telecom at least half as long. :)

    (Best British newspaper headline ever: "The Further Machinations of Froggy Telecom")
  • If I'd known that an IM software package would be worth $42 million, I would have started on it a long time ago. Let's see, we have a messaging protocol, a peer-to-peer client, a simple directory service and hooks to/from external IM services. Very conservatively, 3-6 months work there. Maybe I'm missing something but I'm thinking that France Telecom must be run by a bunch of idiots. Jason.
  • I applaud the effort to make universal stardards and IM clients that use them. These are exactly the type of efforts necessary to make it work. But- is it me or am I the only person who is becoming less and less interested in being "instantly available"..? And more and more I find myself wanting ways to do the exact opposite, and make myself harder to find.
  • Something has been seriously screwy with the moderation these last couple weeks.

    Personally, I think that jabber has a lot of potential as a business. They are basically the only open instant messaging protocol available. The ietf is thinking about creating a different open protocol but it will be at most a subset of jabber functionality and easilly reproduceable as a jabber transport. And anyways who knows when they are going to finish it?

    Imunified.org also is talking about creating a standard. But all of those people use central servers and have add based revenue. I think when they are talking about a standard they only mean a standard that members of imunified can use and not an open standard.

    Thus, if you are looking for a open im protocol with servers and clients that are already written then jabber is the only serious option currently available.

    This is what jabber has to sell.

    What the parent post said is true too. There are tons of applications for jabber besides just teenage girls chatting.

    In the end though making money is far more complicated than just having something to sell. I have seen several grocery stores and resteraunts go out of business in this town. And everyone has to eat right?

    7 million could go a long way, or you could spend it all in a year.

  • Fog Over the English Channel, Europe Cut Off

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
  • -- Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com) 2173541 2173709 2173793 2174069 2174087 2174239 2174329 ...?

    Oh boy. [google.com]

    --
  • Why, this could be as huge as Minitel!

  • Want to see good C? (Score:4)

    by jallen02 ( 124384 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:57PM (#236644) Homepage Journal
    Download the Jabber server source.

    Some of the prettiest C I have seen. Comments where they should be. Written modular and split up into parts that make sense. Simply and elegant memory manager. Hell we ARE talking about the server to jabber. If you dont like jabber.com server start your own server and get your friends using it!

    Best of all, my company has looked at possibly using Jabber server side and open documentation for our own custom chat client. Grab the windows jabberCOM and hack up a quick VB client, instant chat the way you like it...

    Jabber is some seriously cool stuff and is IM the right way IMO.

    Jeremy

  • I fail to see how this is off topic. idiot moderators

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • A network solely for some group of people who think they're so important is different from making a list of AIM names and then blocking everyone who's not on the list HOW?

    CometSystems' "smart cursor" is different from vaunted (now dead) NBCi's ClickQuick (QuickClick?) technology? They're selling stuff people aren't asking for.

    I'm using their Jabber IM 1.7.0.14 (Windows), and even though it's proprietary, the open source clients aren't any better. IT depts would be crazy to pay for this 'technology'.

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057

  • money? (Score:3)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:33PM (#236647) Homepage
    How is Jabber making money? Other than hoping people will invest in them, what do they have to sell that people *want* to buy?

    What I'm trying to say is, why will Jabber.com not become a fucked company?

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • If you actually called you would find out there really isn't a Win32 release ready. It may alpha at best right now. There has been some work with Cygwin to make it work on Win32 and has had some success. Some of the developers are using Win2k. There is some work on the Win32 port doing it from scratch but it will take some time. You can try the bleeding edge with the Cygwin/Win32 port, wait for the native port or find a dedicated box you can put Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/Etc.

    Generally speaking, the reason Win32 costs more is because it takes more work to port some things over. Windows doesn't uses pipes, isn't really POSIX compliant, etc. and a lot of people need a little incentive to go through the trouble. The same goes for something that was originally written for Win32 to take it to another platform.

  • even more fascinating... (Score:3)

    by bapink01 ( 137229 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:31PM (#236649)
    At the last ORA open source conference [oreilly.com], I talked to the jabber folks. Initially, I couldn't get past the instant messaging part of Jabber. I kept thinking, "Oh this is a great way for teenage girls to pass notes." The booth guy was ready to strangle me the third time I said, "So basically this is Instant Messaging." The IM isn't the best part of Jabber.

    The best part is the idea of a presence engine. This thing knows that you are online. It can aggregate and integrate IM servers. The XML could be modified to store other arbitrary properties. It could do the same thing for letting music stream to the computer you are on (regardless of location). There is a real potential for all sorts of applications other than IM (Think GPS or the mythical badges [pscu.com] you wear at bill gates house that lets the house change background music or art [microsoft.com] according to your tastes.)

    IMO, that is what is the cool about Jabber, an XML (and therefore more easily extended) presence engine.

    Think how this could be used with X10. (Frankly I'm still excited about the fact that my programable thermostat wakes me up with heat better than the alarm clock does with sound.)

  • no (Score:4)

    by Acous ( 141729 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:14PM (#236650) Homepage Journal
    • jabber has some nice server-side features for blocking messages you dont want to see
    • you can run your own jabber server if you want
    • jabber supports an irc gatway
    • jabber has its own "groupchat" protocol section
    regarding the scripting issue, theres at least 2 solutions to that. the first is obvious: make a scriptable IM client. the second is to make an irc module to jserver. there is already a very basic one, but its old and im not sure if it works with the latest server version.

    that means you could use jabber from your irc client (join #jabber, your contact list are shown as users in the channel, online people have ops etc.) and you can join groupchat channels on any server. eg myroom@myjserver.org, jdev@jabber.org, ircchan%irc.light.se@irc.myjserver.org.

    you could even add server side channel bookmarks and nickserv identifys.
  • Ups, you're French apparently. Well, it's even worse... you're buying into stereotypes imported for ideological reasons.
  • A large part (maybe the majority) of Alcatel shares are on the French market, not on the American one. Alcatel opened a capitalization on Wall Street just very recently. In the meanwhile, Cisco and Nortel don't have market caps in Europe. But that's not the point: if you knew what you were talking about, you would never compare the sizes of different companies using capitalizations, but using revenues. Otherwise Yahoo!, just 12 months ago, was "larger" than Boeing: makes sense, doesn't it?
  • And where do you think ADSL will be in 5 years, compared to cable, RNIS and regular modems? In 10 years? If you seriously think that the cable will take over DSL, well, I'd be happy to bet on it :)
  • Oh, gimme a fucking break, will you!? We're talking about a $7 million investment, from the FTT branch. If you seriously think that the French government decides of such small investments for the remote FFT branch, you're completely clueless.
  • > As a moron that knows nothing about finance, are
    > you suggesting that Alcatel is more Valuable
    > than Microsoft whose revenue is 24B ?

    Not "more valuable", but simply larger. For the moment.

  • Re:Reason for everything (Score:3)

    by kalifa ( 143176 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:24PM (#236656)
    > In really precise niche markets like electronic
    > components.

    Yeah, right. Like, for example, the tiny Alcatel which happens to be #1 on a tiny niche market such as ADSL, and which happens to be just bigger than tiny dwarves such as Cisco and Nortel combined. Niche markets, I'm telling you!

    As far as FT is concerned, you obviously have no clue on the nomination process of the CEO, and on the decision-taking process inside these part-private part-state owned companies. You also seem to have a very peculiar source of informations for your percentage figures...

    Oh, well. I suppose it's much more comfortable to see France through archaic cliches. Makes things simpler, doesn't it? What fun would it be to try o get a clue, if it forced you to ask yourself some serious questions?

  • Re:Reason for everything (Score:4)

    by kalifa ( 143176 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:52PM (#236657)
    > Is France trying to compete with other countries
    > in todays electronics?

    1st, France does very well in today's electronics, thank you. 2nd, it's not the French government who decides where FTT will invest its money, so THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT.

    You may not be a conspiracist, but at least you're a stereotype-prone ignorant.

    Dammit.

  • fascinating... (Score:5)

    by thrillbert ( 146343 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:42PM (#236658) Homepage
    Taking a look at their site, not only do they plan on making money for the 'windows' version of the client, but if you pay attention to the pics shown, you can actually have your own internal jabber server.

    What that means is that companies such as cisco, could set up their own jabber server to allow their CCO members to instant message with a Rep regarding problems (maybe bad example because if your network is down, no chance of getting to cisco in the first place).

    When IM (read: icq) started becoming popular, I could imagine big companies providing tech support via IM. What happened to that? I don't know.. maybe the technology was too foreign to some of the execs and what FT is planning to do with the software is making it friendlier to the big cheeses, which will mean revenue and a return on their investment.

    --
    That of course is just my .02 cents worth, which with the recent crash of the market makes it more like .000045 cents worth.
  • Jabber is designed to allow proprietary extensions. Heck, secure login as an extension of the base protocol. A jabber stream is multi-layered, and as long as you can provide a decent amount of the supplied content in the base-protocll then you can add as many extensions as you want.
  • I thought they were neat when i first got ICQ long ago, but for me, it quickly turned from an instant messenger to instant annoyer. I use irc for most online communications now, other than email. It tends to be more useful for conversations involving more than 1 person and you can run your own server, and not rely on the services of some faceless company. Plus, most irc clients are much more expandable thru scripting compared to most IM clients.
  • Wow. Another company that reimplements my procmail config.

  • Why Jabber is a good thing. (Score:5)

    by SquadBoy ( 167263 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:40PM (#236662) Homepage Journal
    I'm just going to answer all of the why use Jabber questions here.
    Security. Jabber has support for ssl and some clients (Gabber) have built in support for pgp. Also because it is really free and open you can set up an internal server if you want and never go to the internet.
    It supports most of the protocols. I can still talk to my friends who use ICQ and can talk to my friends who are on Jabber and my friend who uses MSN from one client.
    I have my profile wherever I go. Since contacts and all the other information are all serverside I can have the same setup at home, at work, on the road with no effort. Even if it was nothing but an ICQ replacement that feature would make it worth it.
    It is open. That is a good thing by itself.
    In short Jaber is good use it and support it add squadboy@jabber.org to your contacts. :)

  • If you mean sms messaging, it's hopelessly outdated. Only 160 characters per message.

    But on the other hand, this smells like preparing for 3G, and always-on cellphone data.

  • ...as to why France Telecom is interested in Jabber.com

    From the press release:
    "With Orange and Wanadoo, France Telecom is Europe's Number 2 for Wirefree business and Internet Services"

    Now Orange provides GSM cellphone services. Since nobody is quite sure where GSM technology is heading towards, FT probably wants some form of infrastructure for interoperability purposes when the standards war really begins...
  • It's ironic that you mention "supporting voice chat" and "removing a lot of bloat" in the same article. To me, those are totally contradictory.

    I guess one man's bloated creeping feature is another man's killer app.

  • Ah, but the original poster was equating "bloat" with "large memory footprint", not with "poor user interface".

    I agree ICQ sucks due to its poor user interface. But I think the other guy's point is that it sucks due to the immense memory cost of throwing in every possible feature and the kitchen sink.

  • Fantastic point, I want less people to email me and IM me. I want to keep my addresses and handles in as few hands as possible, that way I have to wade through less junk. And your point can be extended to cell phones and pagers. I saw a 12 year old at the mall with a cell phone last week, I'm assuming she thought it was cool and grown up, but I thought kids went to the mall to be with the friends and get away from their parents? And a pager, that's just a glorified leash!

    Things like this bring the world closer together, but the problem is there are less places to hide ;)

    dynamo

  • I wish I knew the source, but I read that also. If I remember right, the order of popularity is: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ. Yes, Yahoo Pager is said to have more users than ICQ. However the hell that happened.

  • Re:Jabber? please (Score:5)

    by infiniti99 ( 219973 ) <justin@affinix.com> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @03:53PM (#236670) Homepage
    You forget that ICQ is controlled by a corporation. Here are the 3 main reasons to use Jabber:

    1) No corporate control.
    2) No central server.
    3) Open standard.

    This puts Jabber in the same class as email. I run my own server and I can say who can have accounts with my system. If some other server goes down, it does not affect me. This is how IM should have been since the very beginning. You can whine all day about the number of users AIM has, or how cool ICQ is, but when it comes down to it, they all suck because they violate those 3 items above.

    Let's not forget that Jabber also has some good functionality:

    1) Serverside contact list.
    2) Multiple chat transports (for evangelizing to other IM users)
    3) Authorization that actually works.

    Go, quickly! http://www.jabbercentral.com/

    -Justin
  • You're right. My point has nothing to do with XML. It has to do with the general architectural goals of Instant Messaging systems. While web content is not intended to be real-time, and as duch, it is not a major incumberence to be told to go and get a client plugin of some kind to view content, it would be a major incumberence to the realtime nature of the system if dis-similar clients with dis-similar capabilities were used on the same IM service, for example, if I send a message to my buddy who uses a lesser IM client, and he is notified to updata a particular plugin in order to view currently incoming content, he is far less likely to take immediate action, then if my message to him imediately is displayed without issue. My point is, the minimum standards clients must adhere to would have to be far more stringent than the minimum requirements for something like a web browser.

    --CTH

    --
  • I see a number of ossies with open standards for IM. I'm all for them, but the same issues that occur for the web will occur in the IM arena. That is:
    1. Users' chat capabilities will be dictated by the client they use.
    2. The common method for making Open Standards profitable, is to develop proprietary extentions and enhancements to that standard (which make it no longer standards complient, as it was intended)
    IM is not like the web. you can not expect to vive away a client then make money on selling a server with enhancements. The real-time nature of IM serves to magnify the problem that the web has always encountered, relating to the capabilities of the browser with respect to the server, or the content being served. On the web, you'll occasionally see pages that indicate they require special featured of IE or NS6 or what have you. If I recieved an IM message, intended for my viewing in real-time, and instead of being able to view it, I was instructed to get a newer IM client with more capabilities, this would not only srve to agrivate me, it would also serve to completely destroy the valie of an Instant Messaging system, because the content was not delivered in realtime as is the goal of IM.

    On the web, this is a minor annoyance, because vary little content is intended for realtime viewing (with the exception of some streaming audio/video content, etc.), but inthe IM arena this would be a serious problem.

    So, here's my question. Where's the revenue stream? Is it in systems integration? It's certainly not in server sales alone. It might be in the provision of the service as a whole, but I don't see anyone getting away with charging a per-message fee at this point.

    The only viable business model I can see is in integration, "We will integrate our IM system with your home automation system, or the hospital's heart monitors" or whatever. I can see possibly selling 'conduits' connecting existing email infastructures, paging systems, and monitoring solutions with a freely provided OSS IM solution, but that's kind of a streach.

    Don't get me wrong. OSS IM solutions are great, but I'm not sure I see where the revenue streams are going to be coming from.

    --CTH

    --
  • Bit of a late reply, but both North American and EU technology companies have been known for innovating, and seeing North American companies have done a lot of these sort of investments, why not the Europeans? :) On a personal note, I hope this doesn't start off a change of events where Jabber doesn't lose the open source edge that it holds. (Needless thought of conspiracy here: maybe France Telecom hope to put adware/spyware/schmyware into the jabber.com Jabber client. ;-)
  • With this new messaging protocol over cell phones, I think we can message with voice instead of text! Just think, you're walking down the road and hear your phone beep to tell you that you have a new message. You hit a button and BAM! You can use voice to message back and forth! This is pure genious!
  • When IM (read: icq) started becoming popular, I could imagine big companies providing tech support via IM. What happened to that? I don't know.. maybe the technology was too foreign to some of the execs and what FT is planning to do with the software is making it friendlier to the big cheeses, which will mean revenue and a return on their investment.

    I dunno. I work for a large company and use IM for many business related things. In fact the only thing I have ever had to actually call for support for (aside from some internal tools) has been the IM. That would be tough-- support the IM via IM... ;)

  • Amusing, considering my recent sojourn in France for two weeks, that you pick up the news about Jabber.com and yet ignore France Telecom's major investments in Linux computers in every French schoolroom, including departments like the French West Indies and so on.

    Now, if you'd reported something on Loft Story [loftstory.fr], which has a 66 percent market share on TV and is a major internet scandal in France, resulting in a public rebuke by the French minister for TV and cable over coverage, I might find that interesting. But since that's real news that all the french are obsessed with, especially the techies who hacked the video and audio feed to get past the censorship controls, I doubt you'll report on it.

    [note - I have owned France Telecom before, so I'm not unbiased, but I am informed]

  • Seriously, everyone's more into cell phones and WAP there. Got to have been around 20 IPOs in recent months there connected with software and hardware for same.

    The cash cow is cable services at the moment, and FTE isn't about to kill the current services just to support open source, even if they're the major adopter of such.

    [just back from two weeks vacation in France - Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice, Antebbes - and interesting seeing how stuff is used there on the ground]

  • This is the most amazing news of the year. France Telecom (FT) is a huge piece of dumb crap. I can't see theses people investing money in anything not being extremely profitable. Some background: FT is the historic telcos in France. It was a monopoly until 2 years, and there are going very well, thank you (much like the Baby Bells vs the others in the US). And it also seems that they will be the only DSL provider around next year. I'd like to remind everyone that local phone is still $1/5 min in France. Yeh that's a complete ripoff and that why France is lagging behind the US in terms of Internet Access. Yes they invented the Minitel in the 80s (a dumb terminal) and it was kind of nice and cutting-edge, but right now it's a huge brake to the development of e-commerce in France. The Minitel has a really nice business model: pay as you go, anywhere between $1/10 minutes (public services) and $1/1 minute (professional services and porn). So it's a huge cash cow for everyone involved. I would like to see Jabber take over the world, but I'm quite sure that FT got a really precise idea about how to make this thing profitable, and it might not be compatible with the open-source philosophy of Jabber. Or maybe they don't have a clue and are buying stuff, well, because the investment fund is not empty yet. By the way, FT is known to spend the money they collect from there bounded customer in stupid and politically oriented investments... So wait and see.
  • >1st, France does very well in today's electronics,

    Well, kind of... In really precise niche markets like electronic components.
    When french companies will pay their engineers more than $30,000 a year (no kidding), maybe...

    >2nd, it's not the French government who decides where FTT will invest its money, so THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT.

    FT used to be totally under control: FT was directed by the French Government. Now, it's different: theorically they are a private company, but the state owns more than 50% of it, the CEO is designated by the French Government and strategic decisions are always *discussed*... FT is a huge cash cow for the state.
    But $7 million is NOTHING for FT, so I guess it's just a move from a senior manager.

  • It's nice too see an open standard take on proprietary media heavyweights, but I think JXTA has a better chance at NBT status in that it can work with nearly any device and that you don't have to leave personal information on some big database. P2P4Ever!!
  • Look how much AOL paid for ICQ (of course, most of that money was just to gain the userbase).

    Yes, the technical aspects behind IM aren't rocket science.. But most of the money isnt for the technology, per se, as much as it is simply to gain the services/support of the Jabber developers who have already clearly built a good, working product.

    Its true that there's many programmers that could knock off a usable IM solution in their spare time over a couple of month period -- but how do you know how good their solution will be until they actually do it? Jabber, at this point, is pretty well proven and the developers now have a ton of experience dealing with all the different open and closed IM protocols.

    That's what the money is for.

  • For another chat system that, whilst not being free (for the server), does have the following features:

    published client source-code

    encrypts all traffic on the system

    works with MySQL as backend

    try Sonork (sonork.com), dev page at http://www.sonork.com/eng/devzone/default.htm [sonork.com].

  • That makes some sense, but really, minutes are pretty cheap these days.

    PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL THEM IF YOU NEED TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEM!

    *whew*

    Dancin Santa
  • As an outed Karma Whore, I'll flesh out the conjecture that I made previously all the while sounding like an authority. ;-)

    FT pays Jabber.com to gain a stake in their business. Jabber.com is not especially known for their money-making abilities and gladly accepts the funding. FT then orders Jabber.com to fork the Jabber tree and create a new incompatible version of the messaging system (maybe not using XML but some other system, I don't know). Let's call this new system Rebbaj. Development continues on Jabber in the open, but FT keeps a close watch to make sure that no Rebbaj code slips through to Jabber.

    Jabber.com continues to bleed money and FT continues to prop it up. Eventually FT stops funding Jabber.com and begins hiring talent away leaving a crippled Jabber.com. Jabber.com declares bankruptcy and all unchecked-in Jabber source code is turned over to Jabber.org. Meanwhile FT now controls Rebbaj which no one except a group of engineers internal to Jabber.com knew existed. FT is then able to freely call Rebbaj their own (after all, they own 23% of the company) and distribute it under whatever license they see fit.

    Do you have some secret agenda? Do you work for AOL?

    No secret agenda, I just don't think putting faith into FT as a benevolent Open Source contributor is such an easy thing to do.

    The goal of Jabber is to create an open (and better) standard for IM instead of having multible standards as we have now.

    I agree. But what is FT's goal? Beyond what their press release says?

    Dancin Santa
    Was that Karma whorish enough?
  • - Because current messaging is getting old. SMS is excellent for simple messaging between phones but thats about it

    So they want a replacement for messaging. Makes sense.

    - Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM

    Sounds like a good idea, but how much functionality are you looking for? And realistically, how much functionality can you provide over IM?

    - Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that

    So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.

    - Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves

    First, it's doubtful that 3rd parties will develop anything for Jabber just because it is Open. Second, FT doesn't gain anything by donating money to Jabber, at least anything they couldn't have usurped without paying.

    - And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned

    Because you're pulling these reasons out of your ass?

    This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.

    Dancin Santa

  • Why IM? (Score:3)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:16PM (#236686) Journal
    The technology already exists to send messages back and forth between mobile devices. Unless FT is looking to build some sort of proprietary version of Jabber, there doesn't seem to be any reason for them to have bought it in the first place.

    Dancin Santa

  • Re:Why IM? (Score:3)

    by majid ( 306017 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @08:25PM (#236689) Homepage
    Disclaimer: I used to work for FT, but no longer. My comments in no way indicate any official position of the company.

    First of all, you need to realize that FT is an extremely large company, where the right hand usually doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and where $7M is pocket change.

    They do have very smart people in their R&D centers, and Patrick Puges, who is mentioned in the press release, used to be the CTO of Transpac, their Enterprise data networks division. This can suggest an enterprise slant to this story, or alternatively, a tie-in with their equivalent of Bell Labs, i.e. an upstream hedge-your-bets kind of investment.

    One can only conjecture, but the real-time directory and presence service that are the base for an IM product have a strong chance of being core infrastructure for future communication services.

    Most of the people who work at FT have a strong suspicion of proprietary solutions and do not want to kiss Steve Case or Bill Gates' rings. FT thus has a motive in nurturing an open alternative.

    You can see this as poisoning potential competitors' wells, just as Sun's investment in StarOffice makes sense as a way to starve Microsoft's Office revenue stream in the long term.
  • wow. they're up to 100 million now. my number is under 1,200,000... grown fast. anyway, aim has 29 million actually aol users, something like 39 million standalone aim users, 2.8 million compuserve users and 34 million netscape.com users (thereby tying them into aim)... and of course, they own icq too. aol owns instant messaging.
  • i may have mispoken. the protocol itself, i cannot vouch for - however, its feature set is pretty complete, and it *does not* require a server, once connecting, to talk - all communication is peer to peer, which avoids server lag, etc. of course, this can be a problem too, and that's why icq includes the option to send through the server. they've been doing this for years, but i hear aol is implementing this feature now too...

  • Re:Jabber? please (Score:3)

    by dhamsaic ( 410174 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:39PM (#236695)
    actually, msn im has the biggest number of users. second is aol im.

    i'll agree with you about icq being superior though, but the fact of the matter is this - it's too complicated for the average person. they have no interest in seeing a person's ip address - they just wanna talk with their friends that use aol.

    it's a shame, too. because icq *is* superior, and licq is an excellent client, but i find myself using gaim most frequently (although i have both of them running at all times) because all of my friends use it. and not because they use aol - but because *their* friends do, or their friend's friends do, etc. that's why i tend to cheer on the development of gaim more than licq, and that's why gaim is developing faster than licq - the userbase is bigger.

    icq is a superior protocol/setup. but it's just not as widespread. and it never will be. that's why aol bought it - so they didn't lose revenue to it.

  • There already are services which let people send Instant Messages through ICQ and AIM to SMS or email clients or WAP browsers on cell phones and vice versa, such as trancell [trancell.com]. I'm sure AIM will have it's own solutions soon as well.

  • Re:jabber.com vs jabber.org (Score:5)

    by ReuabLeahcim ( 443853 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @03:28PM (#236698) Homepage

    *DISCLAIMER* I work for Jabber.com. Thought I'd take a few moments to respond to a few things.

    1. jabber.com hired pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers.

    At one time a lot of different people worked for jabber.com but right now pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers DON'T work for jabber.com. And most all of them work on the open source code anyway.

    2. The jabber.org guys changed away from GPL to jabber.com's own JOSL ("jabber open source license").

    It's more we like adding onto, not changing away from GPL. Like many other Open Source Licenses [opensource.org] JOSL allows dual-licensing. Best of both worlds.

    3. It is unclear (to me) if you contribute to jabber.org how/if your work will be pulled into jabber.com.

    You're work's under your own copyright. Like other open source code, you agree to submit your changes for inclusion in a derivative open source work but that's all. That work will have to be open source too. We can't use your stuff without your permission in any other way. No one can.

    4. jabber.com is the "commercial" version of jabber.org. You pay them for it and they give various kinds of support. They've supposedly done alot of testing on it.

    Yep. Following some of the best open source business examples.

    5. jabber.com is a completely different codebase than jabber.org. (for example .com uses pthreads and .org uses pth different thread libs)). The .com people are trying to add clustering and scalability that .org's code base doesn't have. I'm not sure if they're giving that back to .org

    Not completely, no. And a pthreads version of the .com code has already been released to open source.

    6. I'm skeptical as to how much .org will continue to thrive (as opposed to before .com) now that its main developers are working for .com on a different code base.

    There's no two ways about this: jabber.org will thrive. We're doing a number of things to insure this, most importantly creating the Jabber Foundation, modeled along the lines of the Apache Foundation. We don't have all the answers on balancing commercial and open source relationships. We're open to all kinds of suggestions on how to do this. But know this: we are bound and determined to commit the resources to insure the Project grows.

    7. As of a month ago, the jabber.com server didn't support the msn/yahoo/aim connections because that code is contained in "transports" modules designed to work with jabber.org's vastly different pth-based code base. And my understanding was it would be a "couple of quarter" before they're in. When you try out jabber.com's open server and see that it does appear to connect to msn/yahoo/aim, the way they are doing it is they are running a jabber.org server side-by-side with the jabber.com server and doing a jabber-jabber intermediate transport (ie the .com server is relying on the .org server to do the msn/yahoo/aim connections). I'm saying this is good or bad, but it is definitely a factor if you're considering buying a jabber.com server and support to allow your customers to connect to aim/yahoo/msn.

    We're all working on the best way to do this. I think you'll see some progress sooner than later.

    8. jabber.com won't sell support for aim/msn/yahoo because they can't "indemnify" it (or whatever) - they can't supposedly guarantee the connectivity. While it is true they can't guarantee the connectivity (until aim/yahoo/msn license it) it seems to me they can still sell it while explicitly stating they can't guarantee it. (I believe Odigo does - odigo.com is another IM solution that sells server, client, custom IM stuff).

    See above.

    Hey, if you have any questions, I'm bauer at jabber.com.

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