“But IETF is still likely to be the favored instant messaging
standards route among the community.”
“Believe it or not, Raymond, the high priest of the open source
faith, in an article entitled “Eric S. Raymond–Microsoft is right,
for once”, defends Microsoft in its fight against AOL’s attempt to
block instant messaging using AOL’s publicly proclaimed Instant
Messenger (IM) standards.”
“Raymond does so, in this one instance, he claims, because
Microsoft is pushing for an open standard while AOL busies itself
with reprogramming their servers to block interloping users with
Microsoft, Prodigy and Yahoo Instant Messenger-clone clients.”
…
“Of course, the open source community–rambunctious lot that
they are–isn’t following Mr. Raymond like sheep do a shepherd.
While Raymond’s position has a lot of support, as can be seen in
Linux Today and Slashdot’s message boards, they’re also been some
resistance.”