Monday, America Online (AOL)
began blocking interoperability between its own instant messaging
service and the servers at Jabber.com and Jabber.org. The two
groups have responded, calling for the company to reconsider.
Jabber.org writes:
“It began Monday, when the IPs of some of the larger Jabber
servers offering the AIM Transport as a feature (such as jabber.org
and jabber.com) found their IP addresses firewalled from the AIM
login servers. After discovering this, it took only minutes to move
aim.jabber.org to another IP, but then it seemed that something had
changed at the protocol level and AIM logins were being
disconnected abruptly. The AIM Transport was quickly updated to
correct the login block and service was restored. This happened
again Tuesday and Wednesday, with more relocations and updates to
fix new incompatibilities as they appeared. The service is
currently working on jabber.org, and should work fine for any other
independent server installation using the AIM Transport.”
“What’s troubling about these events is that, these are AIM/AOL
users who have chosen to use alternate software to access only
their valid account. This software is open source and accessible to
anyone, poses no security risks and operates identically to an
official AIM client. Jabber is not competing with AIM and simply
trying to offer users a basic freedom to control and choose their
software and service providers.”
Jabber.com has also weighed in:
“AOL has in the past blocked entities wishing to provide network
interoperability, so it comes as no surprise that interoperability
with Jabber would not be treated any differently. The exception to
this is that Jabber is the only open source, world-wide,
multi-industry, multi-company consortium building an open protocol
system for IM and Jabber represents many different businesses and
business models, many of which do not compete in any way with the
AIM service.”
“…As hopefully you know by now, Jabber.com believes that IM
will proliferate in much the same way that the industry adopted
email (SMTP) server technology. As a result, Jabber.com is focused
on becoming the premiere provider of commercially supported instant
messaging software and solutions, and our Jabber server running at
jabber.com was never more than a well run demonstration of what
Jabber can do for others.”
“Interoperability has been, and continues to be a large part of
the value of Jabber and the open source movement continues to do a
superb job at bridging new messaging networks and devices. In just
under 11 months, the Jabber network has grown to well over 30,000
Jabber servers (a 100% increase in less than 60 days), 1,500
developers, 300 projects and 30 IM clients. I think it is fair to
say that Jabber may well be the largest and fastest growing IM
network in existence, with more deployed servers and clients,
running on more platforms and devices than any other IM
system.”