[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Over the past few years, instant messaging (IM) has grown from
a small niche market to the latest “must-have” technology. While IM
competition between the big companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and
Amercia Online has grown quite fierce, the open source community
has remained strangely quiet. Without the open source community
pushing for a standardization of IM protocols, the numerous
competitors have kept their protocol highly proprietary. While
recent developments have urged key players to adopt
standardization, the fruit of these efforts remains to be seen.
Without a major open source project to uphold the standard and
promote cooperation, the users are left to the whims of large,
faceless companies, interoperability flounders and outside
development is non-existent.”
“Enter Jabber. Jabber is a completely open source, cross
platform, feature rich, developer friendly, standards compliant IM
platform. No longer being confined to pre-manufactured and
un-customizable systems opens unimaginable doors into highly
specialized systems with limitless possibilities. By upholding the
standards of groups such as the IETF IMPP group, as well as
creating a “translation” system between IM systems, Jabber promotes
increased progress and allow users to focus on the actual
communicating versus negotiation of which platform to use. To
paraphrase an oft over used song, this is the end of instant
messaging as we know it.”
“Starting in early 1998, Jeremie Miller started the Jabber
project with a simple hope of a cross platform IM system. Annoyed
with the inflexibility of systems like Mirabilis ICQ and America
Online’s IM client, Jeremie began planning. The original idea was
for Jabber to be the answer to the IM dilemma of having numerous
clients running at once in order to keep track of contacts by using
a system of plug-in translators or “transports.”