2008/3/30, Tomasz Sterna <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Dnia 2008-03-30, nie o godzinie 17:48 +0200, Sander Devrieze pisze: > > > > Why another web client? What is wrong with JWChat? > > > And if there is something, maybe it's better to put the efforts in > > > extending/fixing JWChat? > > > > Because competition can result in a better JWChat client *and* a new > > client...and 2 good clients is better than 1 ;-) > > > The "competition law" would be true if we were on the commercial free > market. > But once we are in the Open Source world, I seriously doubt that we have > enough manpower to use the competition to our advantage. > On the contrary - experience shows that segmentation of efforts in OSS > leads to gazilions of half-finished projects.
...at least the Coccinella and the ejabberd projects learned from projects that died. E.g., ejabberd has some of the features we found in the WPJabber changelog and Mats fixed compatibility bugs in Coccinella found when testing things like file transfers with other clients (some of them now death of semi-death). So yes, I'm in favour of *more* new XMPP clients, *more* new XMPP servers, and *more* new XMPP libraries. Advantages of *more*: * people who start new projects are creative and have interesting ideas regarding features and interface design-->incumbent projects will see these sexy features and will copy them (at least we actively do this at Coccinella, and other projects at least do this passively by users requesting the same features) * more people will thoroughly look at the core specifications of XMPP and thus more bugs and implementation issues in them will be found-->the XMPP specifications will get better and this will benefit the whole community * more compliancy bugs with incumbent projects will be found and these issues can be fixed. A good example of this is when ejabberd started to become much more popular where in the past jabberd14 had a monopolistic market share. When this happened several client and library projects found out they had implemented some XMPP specs wrongly.-->with more clients, libraries and servers, the "Web of Compliancy" will get stronger and it will be hard to be incompliant. This is a good protection against strategies like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish > See sf.net for reference. How many campanies go bankrupt each year? How many of them go bankrupt within the first 5 years of their existence. This number is high, especially in highly competitive industries like the Horeca. Anyway, in case you are interested you can find some bankruptcy statistics for Belgium here: http://statbel.fgov.be/indicators/bri_en.asp -- Mvg, Sander Devrieze.
