Google is doing a lot of good things like employing Sean Egan. Look at how much work on the Jabber specification he has done since moving to google. Jabber would not be what it is now without google’s work and here you are critisizing? Take a hike.

Oh, and if you want to reply to this rant, that really is my email and website.

Aaron, I disagree with your interpretation of it. Supporting a proprietary protocol alongside an open protocol does not negate the fact that the open protocol is supported. Google is not switching their own IM client to a proprietary protocol, they are still using XMPP. They are simply trying to play nice with others. I honestly can’t see why that should make anybody in the FOSS community upset.

Let’s look at this from another angle: Google is actively turning people into XMPP users! Yes, that’s right. I seriously doubt anybody with an existing Gmail or GoogleTalk account is going to stop using that simply because AIM is now supported, but having AIM supported will be an added inducement to those who don’t have a Gmail or GoogleTalk account to get one. So Joe is in the market for a new e-mail address, and he uses AIM. Gmail suddenly stands out as a particularly good choice, as it will allow him to keep in touch with his AIM buddies easier, even from work where IM clients are not allow but webmail access is. Joe creates a Gmail account and is now an XMPP user! If any of his friends also have Gmail, he will, unwittingly even, start chatting with an open protocol. Not that Joe cares whether the protocol is open or not…

p.s. Anybody have any idea why OpenID is refusing to authenticate me?

The point of the post, is Google supported an open standard, namely XMPP/Jabber. Even on their official Google Talk blog, they mention that they support open standards. Then, they throw in a proprietary protocol in the mix. This means that they do *not* support open standards, and are blatantly lying to the public. Is lying a good attribute or bad?

To further the mess, by supporting a proprietary protocol in an open one, you have effectively closed your protocol. It doesn’t matter if it’s AIM, MSN, Yahoo! or ICQ, what does matter, is the hybrid mix of open with closed software.

I guess my point of this post is, Google has shown that they are more interested in their wants and desires than the progress of Free Software. Any company that blatantly opposes Free Software is evil in my eye. I see Google hindering the progress of XMPP/Jabber, which is very unfortunate.

Talk about an inflammatory title…

Nevertheless, I think it’s good when companies use XMPP/Jabber, even if they don’t sell it as Jabber. We don’t need the “Firefox of IM”, we need the “E-Mail of IM”: No matter where you have an account, no matter what software you use, you can just get in contact with anybody.

In Germany, one of the biggest freemail providers added an IM service (in fact, three providers belonging to the same company). They don’t sell it as “We now support XMPP”, they sell it as “Hey, come and use our new sexy multi-protocoll IM client” (based on the fact that Jabber itself is multiprotocoll via transports). But I can use my Jabber account to contact these people. And I can tell people, “You already have an email address from them, just grab Pidgin (or their client if you want) and we can start chatting”.

Anyway, don’t fully agree with you because: you won’t be able to convert/impose all your contacts to move to a new IM network. This is ONLY going to work if the new IM network is a viable alternative and it won’t break the established network as in you still get to chat with all your contacts, just like before.

The fact of the matter is Google has a requirement to service its users as best it can. Being that far many more users - most notably in the Western world - use AIM than do any XMPP service, adding support for such protocols in Gmail is a step in the right direction. The average user doesn’t care if the AIM protocol is closed: they care about communicating with their friends and family.

Furthermore, the assumption that supporting multiple-anything is bad is silly among all degrees. Is pidgin evil for supporting multiple protocols through libpurple? Is Gstreamer evil for having plugins that support closed, copyrighted formats? Is anything that could potentially interoperate with any non-open service or software evil? Of course not! None of those things make any company or service or software intrinsically evil.

I suggest you take a step back and re-evaluate what matters here: the best way to service end users; not the best way to stir the political pot.

If multi-protocol offerings are evil, then OpenOffice.org is evil. So is Gimp. So is Amarok. So is….. the list includes damn near every piece of software on my Kubuntu box.