Linux Journal: Talking Jabber

“When I first heard about Jabber, it blew my mind. I’ve always
thought that what we call “instant messaging” is based on notions
of real-time communication that are both rudimentary and
ill-conceived. They all look like stuff that big, controlling
companies foist on zillions of consumers for the purpose of hooking
them into a proprietary environment where they can be zapped with
advertising. Worse, they are not Net-based. They might run on the
Net; but they are, with the single exception of IRC, private
affairs. Until Jabber, there was no way to deploy instant messaging
on the Net in the way we deploy e-mail or web servers. Nothing was
truly open, and nothing was open source. Jabber is all that and
more….”

“Jabber is still newer than new, which is to say it isn’t out
yet, although you can download it from Jabber.org and play with
it–or better yet, jump in and help develop it. I’ve had fun
talking with the Jabber people, and invite open-source developers
to do the same. I’m very interested to see if you agree that this
is an extremely auspicious movement: something on the scale of a
Mosaic, a Sendmail, an Apache or maybe even a Linux.“

Complete
Story