[Gllug] Yahoo messenger in Suse 8.0

[Pete Ryland]

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:13:40PM +0000, Frank Kelly wrote:
> I'm struggling with YM and wonder if anyone else has it running?
> I keep getting dependency problems and 'file not found' messages.
> The install instructions look pretty clear but just don't seem to produce
> the expected results.  

Well, following on from Mr Meeks's excellent presentation, I'm going to be
the Free Software advocate and tell you that proprietary instant messangers
are one of those things that are as bad as products like Microsoft Word.

You see, there are many many talented developers working very hard trying to
reverse engineer these IM protocols and writing clients to try to match
these protocols only to complete something which matches 90% of the protocol
about 90% of the time, but maybe looks a bit ugly since there was no time to
spend on the UI.  Then, two months later, AOL/Miribilis/Microsoft/whoever go
and release the next version of their product which uses an updated and
incompatible protocol - back to square one.  Yes, it really is like this[*].

If a truly free IM was available for every OS, then this would be a
non-issue, right?!  Well, along has come Jabber!  It is completely free (as
in speech), very stable, supports all features the others support (and more)
and will work on almost all platforms (and has a number of very pretty
GUIs).  The server is free, it uses a "future proof"[**] messaging format,
and it can proxy to other IM formats!

So use jabber!  Make jabber more popular!  There are plenty of better things
that our talented free software developers can do with their time than to
waste years trying to reverse engineer a moving target!  "They could be
hacking on GNOME2!" as Mr Meeks would have said. :)

Ok, sorry for the rant,
Pete

[*] You can find a lot of information on the web about this (e.g. a quick
google just found me a page on how AOL released dodgy protocol specs in
order to waste their competitor's time!).  Yeah, do note, however, that it's
clear that the motivation for these tactics was more a battle between the
proprietary IMs than an effort to stop free software users participating -
but it has affected us greatly.

[**] Geez I hate buzz words like this.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug