Salvatore Iovene

In order to ful­fill what has been a propo­si­tion of mine for quite a long time, as of Decem­ber the 1st 2007, I will no longer use any Instant Mes­sag­ing ser­vices based on a closed pro­to­col, e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM or Yahoo. The only way you will be able to con­tact me (besides con­ven­tional meth­ods such as phone and email) will be through my Jab­ber ID: salvatore.iovene at googlemail.com (replace “at” with “@”). This also works from GMail.

Rea­son

Pro­pri­etary IM sys­tems have a ter­ri­ble flaw: MSN users can’t chat with Yahoo users, AIM can’t chat with ICQ, and so on. So if I have friends who only use MSN and other friends who only use ICQ, I will have to use both to keep in touch with every­body. The rea­son for this is the cor­po­rate greed tak­ing advan­tage of the net­work effect. Wikipedia says:

The net­work effect is a char­ac­ter­is­tic that causes a good or ser­vice to have a value to a poten­tial cus­tomer depen­dent on the num­ber of cus­tomers already own­ing that good or using that service.

This also reflects the fact that cor­po­rates are valu­ing their own profit bet­ter than the final user’s sat­is­fac­tion. More­over, I don’t like the idea of using a closed pro­to­col. “Closed pro­to­col” means that the data (e.g. chat mes­sages) exchanged by two com­put­ers involved in a trans­ac­tion, is rep­re­sented with a secret for­mat, that the user is not allowed to study. Jab­ber, on the other hand, uses an open pro­to­col, based on XML. Every­body is allowed to study the pro­to­col, and write clients or servers that sup­port it. This allow col­lab­o­ra­tion and coöper­a­tion. Greedy cor­po­rates, instead, keep the pro­to­col secret in order to be the only ones able to write a client and a server for it, so they impose you the use of their clients (such MSN) which might be bloated with spy­ware and advertisements.

Since I’ve decided that I don’t want to sup­port this kind of behav­iour, I will unsub­scribe from the closed pro­to­col ser­vices that I use. You don’t have to do the same, but just get your­self a Jab­ber account in order to keep in touch with me, and, pre­ferrably, con­vince your friends to do the same.

What is Jabber?

When you hear some­one (prob­a­bly me) talk­ing about Jab­ber, they are usu­ally refer­ring to one of the following:

• The XMPP (Jab­ber) Protocol
• The Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Net­work (PFJN)
• The Jab­ber Plat­form (which includes the pre­vi­ous items, as well as jab­ber chat clients, devices, trans­ports, etc.)

Jab­ber is, strictly speak­ing, the infor­mal name of an open-standard decen­tral­ized instant mes­sag­ing pro­to­col offi­cially called XMPP.

NOTE: It is also the name of a com­pany called Jab­ber Inc., which sells Jabber-based prod­ucts. How­ever, the Jab­ber plat­form is much larger than this sin­gle com­pany. Don’t let this con­fuse you! If you want to go to the author­i­ta­tive web­site about jab­ber, that would be jabber.org, not jabber.com!

The net­work of inde­pen­dent Jab­ber servers on the inter­net make up the Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Net­work. If you have an account on a server on the PFJN, then you can com­mu­ni­cate with any­one else who has an account on a PFJN server. This means that Google Talk users can com­mu­ni­cate seam­lessly with Gizmo-Project users (and vice-versa), as both of these ser­vices are on the Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Network.

How can I use Jabber?

To use Jab­ber you need a Jab­ber client and an account on a server. Here’s a list of pop­u­lar clients:

MS Win­dows

• Pan­dion
• Psi
• Google Talk Client (works only with google talk, sup­ports voice chat via jingle)
• Gizmo Project Client (Works only with gizmo project, sup­ports SIP/VOIP)
• Gaim
• Tril­lian Pro

MacOS X

• iChat AV
• Adium
• Psi
• Gizmo Project Client (Works only with gizmo project, sup­ports SIP/VOIP)

GNU/Linux

• Gaim
• Psi

Then you will need an account. Most of the listed clients will allow you to cre­ate a Jab­ber account choos­ing from a list of servers, or, if you want, you can run your own server.

Google Talk

If you have a gMail account, then you have a jab­ber id via Google Talk! Your jab­ber id is the same as your email address. You can use either the native google talk client or any other jab­ber client.

Gizmo Project

Also, if you use the Gizmo Project, you too have a jab­ber account. Your jab­ber ID is login-name@chat.gizmoproject.com.

jabber.org

The Jab­ber Soft­ware Foun­da­tion is prob­a­bly the best known Jab­ber server out there. They just recently switched over to ejab­berd for their soft­ware, so they should be quite solid now.

I found myself in the process of real­iz­ing a dual-boot sys­tem on a lap­top, with Win­dows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. After wip­ing out the con­tent of the disk and par­ti­tion­ing it appro­pri­ately, I pro­ceed to the instal­la­tion of Win­dows XP (know­ing that I needed to install it first, since it would over­write the MBR and com­pletely dis­re­gard and dis­re­spect user’s free­dom), so I put in the so-called Recov­ery Disk pro­vided with that par­tic­u­larly Fujitsu-Siemens lap­top. After a lit­tle while, the Recov­ery Disk was propos­ing me to install Win­dows XP either using the full disk, or in two par­ti­tions, with a 10 GB “data” par­ti­tion. I was aston­ished and out­raged. It seems that the Fujitsu-Siemens peo­ple were think­ing that the user wasn’t smart enough to be able to choose what par­ti­tion use for his or her Win­dows install. They would rather limit the user’s free­dom, and not give him or her some choice. I sus­pect this was the result of some pres­sure from the Microsoft end: this “trick” basi­cally stops the user from installing other Oper­at­ing Sys­tems along Win­dows, unless he or she buys a new non-branded copy.

Fujitsu-Siemens and Microsoft: shame on you!