On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Binand Raj S. wrote: |On Friday 05 April 2002 16:16 pm, Kingsly John wrote: |> On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, radical wrote: |> |Now if the protocol is open, then all these features can be implemented |> | by the open-source clients, in maybe different ways/styles suitable for |> | diff environments, diff kinda uses etc. |> |> If the protocol was open.. M$FT could integrate it into MSN maybe even |> force all MSN users to upgrade to the new protocol... and then do their |> usual magic of embrace and extend... and yahoo will end up losing all |> their messenger users to MSN! | |You mean MSN would do something like "Talk to your Yahoo buddy" in the MSN |messenger client?
We already have companies like indiatimes.com trying to get people to use their IM client ... by piggybacking on ICQ/Yahoo/MSN etc (and they even take out print ads against Yahoo!!)... Yahoo is providing me with servers that keep track of over 100 contacts and receive offline messages for me ... they are spending money on all that ... so if they are going to have someone come and hijack their servers because they tried to be nice to a small section of their userbase.. and they end up losing the bulk of their users it would be a really dumb thing to do business wise. |So are you sad that protocols like HTTP, IMAP etc. are open, so that |Microsoft could embrace and extend them?? Aren't they already trying to do that ?? And lets not forget that the protocols you mentioned are not owned by any one company.. so there was enough competition .. enough companies that support the standard for one company to cause too much of damage. But in this case the Yahoo protocol is only useful for talking with Yahoo! servers ... so by opening up the protocol everyone gets to use their CPU/Storage/Software for free ?? And I'm sure that the moment yahoo decides to start charging for their service.. half the people here that are clamouring for them to make it open source will quietly move on to some other service ... you will notice that in the number of yahoo.com users subscibed to this list today .. and how many will remain after 24th of this month when it goes paid. |Seems to me the worst argument why a PROTOCOL should be closed. That |too with sophisticated network sniffers and reverse engineering tools |available. And don't forget that it is Microsoft that develops the OS |on which the client implementing this protocol is going to run. Lets not forget that if M$FT tries to reverse engineer the Yahoo! protocol they could be hit with the DMCA or some such crappy legislation... but if the protocol were open .. then there won't be anything to stop that from happening. (IIRC M$ already tried this with AOL and then had to disable the feature.) Kingsly _______________________________________________ linux-india-help mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-help
