I think the point is that if a portal is seen as being officially
endorsed by the JSF, and names an 'Official Client' that this, by
extension, makes all other clients 'unofficial clients'. The assumption
is that unofficial clients are less good, and so by claiming that one
client is 'official' you are insulting all of the others.
Of course for your own portal this is not an issue. I recommend that
anyone using my server from Windows uses JAJC (because it seems the most
feature-complete and easy to use) and from Linux uses Gabber (because it
had all of the features I wanted at the time, although it's getting a
bit long in the tooth now. Really looking forward to Gabber2). The
discussion here is not about individual servers, however, it is about a
portal which is going to be the consumer-facing part of the Jabber
community. Such a site would have a responsibility to the entire Jabber
community which is not served by insulting our most valuable asset,
namely the people who give up their own time to write free software for
Jabber. I think that the only way we could justify an 'official' client
would be if the JSF were willing to pay someone to work full time on it,
and release the code under a BSD-style license so that anyone (open
source or commercial) could use it as a base for their own clients, and
I would not consider this to be a particularly sensible use of resources.
Tijl Houtbeckers wrote:
"Michael Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 16-6-2003 10:37:16:
Rachel - seriously, drop the term "Official Client" - please. That is
really going to start pissing off other client developers (starting
with me).
If I make a portal and choose an official client for it (and call it
exactly that), there's nothing you can do about it. It's very
unfortunate if that would piss you off (for you), but I don't see any
reason why it should upset you in the first place? The choice of client
in Jabber is not limited to the end-user. The provider of the server
has the same right of choosing a client. And yes, it can go hand in
hand with promotion of Jabber. Tipic comes to mind as an example.
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