9 ms·

What a sad day. A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use

What a sad day. A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps. (Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)

Camillo 11y ago
XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.) I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.
- colanderman 11y ago
  Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps. (Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)
  - techsupporter 11y ago
    > not even pretending to support consumer choice By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it. Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business. That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.
    - colanderman 11y ago
      I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.
      - prohor 11y ago
        WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.
        aerique 11y ago
        Yeah, I've never understood this. I've seen it now-and-then when installing WA for family members, but I (and they) have never, ever had to pay for it after using it for multiple years.
        feld 11y ago
        It's free since Facebook bought them. I've had Android friends mention payment screens are still on their WhatsApp though.
        marcosdumay 11y ago
        It was free before Facebook brought them too. It just nagged people to pay once a year, but if one didn't pay, it just kept working.
    - Camillo 11y ago
      What about Comcast? What about airlines?
    - _cudgel 11y ago
      s/Customer/Citizen/ and you've hit on a large portion of the problem with representative democracy.
    - 11y ago
- simoncion 11y ago
  > It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place... What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence? Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)
  - Corrado 11y ago
    I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response: "XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices." This capability was indeed one of the major selling points of Apple's messaging system in the most recent iOS & OS X releases. If XMPP cannot keep track of multiple clients then that is a huge flaw in todays mobile world.
    - ge0rg 11y ago
      Unfortunately it is not true. XEP-0280 [0] (Message Carbons; since 2010) forwards your conversation to all your online clients, and XEP-0313 [1] (Message Archive Management; since 2012, but only recently implemented) allows a client to "catch up" with the history when it goes online. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
    - mc7457 11y ago
      Whatsapp never supported this "fundamental feature" and is globally the most used messenger in "todays mobile world" by a wide margin.
      - heinrich5991 11y ago
        Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)
        colanderman 11y ago
        A closed proprietary non-interoperable extension on XMPP.
- viraptor 11y ago
  While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.
- ge0rg 11y ago
  All these problems have been solved in XMPP years ago, and there are some clients fully supporting the mobile experience and usage of multiple clients. On the Desktop, Swift and Gajim come to my mind, on Android Conversations is getting really awesome (and yaxim, which I am the author of, supports the basic multi-client/mobile use case you are interested in). That said, the XMPP protocol is not perfect, and it is lacking some important elements for a 2010+ mobile chat developer, but considering that it was initially developed in 1999, that mobile chat is only one of its many use cases, and that there are extensions covering all you have asked for, the critique is not appropriate. [0] http://swift.im/swift.html http://swift.im/swift.html [1] http://gajim.org/ http://gajim.org/ [2] http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/ [3] https://yaxim.org/ https://yaxim.org/
  - wink 11y ago
    That's exactly the problem, though. There are so many extensions that it's about as much work finding out which ones are even needed and how they interact for your case (in this case the replay) as is implementing, say, a good chunk of IRC. And no, I'm not exaggerating, I've done both and decided that writing XMPP clients is not for me a long time ago. Addendum: I really love XMPP, but I do think the many many extensions have hurt it more than one defined spec. And yes, I know it supports many use cases, but I simply only care for 1:1 and multi user chat.
    - ge0rg 11y ago
      You are right. The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently preparing to create a list of "must-have" client and server XEPs for certain use cases, like Instant Messaging or IoT. This will hopefully make the path easier for future application developers.
  - goffi 11y ago
    Just for the record, we are also working on a next-gen XMPP client, with decentralized blogging, file sharing, end 2 end encryption and all, and planing to do an Android port. Other projects like Movim also do similar things too, XMPP is definitely very alive these days. Sending message to other devices is managed by message carbons which is in last call for being a standard XEP, and support is becoming more and more common. XMPP is all but deprecated, very active, working well, with a large ecosystem. But is really badly known by most of people(I have by the way started a series of article to explain it: http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp). It's really difficult to be heard these days, but there is a new wave in XMPP world (check our project: http://salut-a-toi.org http://salut-a-toi.org or movim: http://movim.eu http://movim.eu).
- _yy 11y ago
  Not true, XMPP does have that feature and there are multiple clients which implement this. It works amazingly well. It's not an extension, but part of the standard. Example: http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/
robotkilla 11y ago
Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps. But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else. edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets
- colanderman 11y ago
  It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain. At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?
    - colanderman 11y ago
      Permanent user bans: http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on-users-with-3rd-party-apps-20150306/ http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on...
      - dest 11y ago
        I you can hack other's people accounts, it seems a good opportunity to force people out of WhatsApp. Just hack a guy's phone and connect him to WhatsApp through a third party client, get him permanently banned, and voilà!
    - simgidacav 11y ago
      Actually we see attempts to extend libpurple with many recent protocols. For instance telegram works on pidgin AFAIK, and I could recently see se a Tox plugin. Clearly we cannot play a fair game with the closed whatsapp, but hacking cannot be stopped or forbidden. After all, it was always like that. If you go back of 10 years al "regular people" had MSN and similar stuff, and we were IRCing. As a hacker, you migth feel sad, and think openness lost the war. IMHO the only difference is that nowadays we have much more "regular people" than before. They were simply sms-ing before they could access whatsapp.
mkhpalm 11y ago
Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop). It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun. These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion. I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
  - ryukafalz 11y ago
    >I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well Matrix (http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.
- welly 11y ago
  > I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS) You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use. "Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.
- jfim 11y ago
  Of all the systems to transmit messages, SMS is probably the least proprietary. Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?
skarap 11y ago
Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests. Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.
- colanderman 11y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.
  - Too 11y ago
    Don't they already? Gmail was the embrace-extend phase. Now we are into extinguish. Try setting up your own email server, it will be marked as spam by most major webmail providers.
    - skarap 11y ago
      They still play good with the other few large email services. But with every year using google apps for business is becoming more and more obvious choice from economical POV. In fact I've myself recommended quite a few companies to "just use Google apps". I guess it just takes time too switch phases.
    - vbezhenar 11y ago
      I use my own server, and I can't say that everyone is marking me as a spam. With correct setup and a little bit of good history gmail works fine for me. I removed SPAM label from my mail in Gmail and asked few friends to do the same. Now my mail isn't marked as spam in gmail. And for yandex.ru and mail.ru it worked out of the box.
    - samuellb 11y ago
      I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails? They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.
kbenson 11y ago
I blame Apple[1]. Google's chat was free, but what happens when you have a free and open protocol, and your competitors don't? They consume your chats, but you can't consume theirs. Soon, your chat software can't compete. Apple has repeatedly chosen the path or proprietary when they could do open. They are Microsoft from the 90's with a better PR department. 1: I have little evidence beyond what looks obvious, but that could definitely be wrong. I'm open to new information proving me wrong.
- nicklaf 11y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- corv 11y ago
  In 2010 Jobs promised "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Afaik it didn't happen because of patent issues.
  - Qantourisc 11y ago
    Patents prevent you from documenting, what is already documented in the patents ?!? I do however recognize the usage of the open standard would be limited by this. But one has options: other users could get a license, or one could try to change the protocol, to be able to avoid (some) patents, allowing both the patented and non patented way. To me it just feels like they just don't care enough.
    - ascagnel_ 11y ago
      Party A may have an agreement or indemnification clause from patent holder B, but they may not have the right to extend that to other parties. So when C comes along and implements party A's new thing, they leave themselves open to lawsuits from party B. Also, patents do not have to document everything. You can leave out some trade secrets, as long as the patent itself documents enough to prove it's a novel invention.
- gurkendoktor 11y ago

Camillo 11y ago

XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.) I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.

colanderman 11y ago
Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps. (Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)
- techsupporter 11y ago
  > not even pretending to support consumer choice By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it. Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business. That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.
  - colanderman 11y ago
    I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.
    - prohor 11y ago
      WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.
      - aerique 11y ago
        Yeah, I've never understood this. I've seen it now-and-then when installing WA for family members, but I (and they) have never, ever had to pay for it after using it for multiple years.
        feld 11y ago
        It's free since Facebook bought them. I've had Android friends mention payment screens are still on their WhatsApp though.
        marcosdumay 11y ago
        It was free before Facebook brought them too. It just nagged people to pay once a year, but if one didn't pay, it just kept working.
  - Camillo 11y ago
    What about Comcast? What about airlines?
  - _cudgel 11y ago
    s/Customer/Citizen/ and you've hit on a large portion of the problem with representative democracy.
  - 11y ago
simoncion 11y ago
> It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place... What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence? Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)
- Corrado 11y ago
  I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response: "XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices." This capability was indeed one of the major selling points of Apple's messaging system in the most recent iOS & OS X releases. If XMPP cannot keep track of multiple clients then that is a huge flaw in todays mobile world.
  - ge0rg 11y ago
    Unfortunately it is not true. XEP-0280 [0] (Message Carbons; since 2010) forwards your conversation to all your online clients, and XEP-0313 [1] (Message Archive Management; since 2012, but only recently implemented) allows a client to "catch up" with the history when it goes online. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
  - mc7457 11y ago
    Whatsapp never supported this "fundamental feature" and is globally the most used messenger in "todays mobile world" by a wide margin.
    - heinrich5991 11y ago
      Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)
      - colanderman 11y ago
        A closed proprietary non-interoperable extension on XMPP.
viraptor 11y ago
While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.
ge0rg 11y ago
All these problems have been solved in XMPP years ago, and there are some clients fully supporting the mobile experience and usage of multiple clients. On the Desktop, Swift and Gajim come to my mind, on Android Conversations is getting really awesome (and yaxim, which I am the author of, supports the basic multi-client/mobile use case you are interested in). That said, the XMPP protocol is not perfect, and it is lacking some important elements for a 2010+ mobile chat developer, but considering that it was initially developed in 1999, that mobile chat is only one of its many use cases, and that there are extensions covering all you have asked for, the critique is not appropriate. [0] http://swift.im/swift.html http://swift.im/swift.html [1] http://gajim.org/ http://gajim.org/ [2] http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/ [3] https://yaxim.org/ https://yaxim.org/
- wink 11y ago
  That's exactly the problem, though. There are so many extensions that it's about as much work finding out which ones are even needed and how they interact for your case (in this case the replay) as is implementing, say, a good chunk of IRC. And no, I'm not exaggerating, I've done both and decided that writing XMPP clients is not for me a long time ago. Addendum: I really love XMPP, but I do think the many many extensions have hurt it more than one defined spec. And yes, I know it supports many use cases, but I simply only care for 1:1 and multi user chat.
  - ge0rg 11y ago
    You are right. The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently preparing to create a list of "must-have" client and server XEPs for certain use cases, like Instant Messaging or IoT. This will hopefully make the path easier for future application developers.
- goffi 11y ago
  Just for the record, we are also working on a next-gen XMPP client, with decentralized blogging, file sharing, end 2 end encryption and all, and planing to do an Android port. Other projects like Movim also do similar things too, XMPP is definitely very alive these days. Sending message to other devices is managed by message carbons which is in last call for being a standard XEP, and support is becoming more and more common. XMPP is all but deprecated, very active, working well, with a large ecosystem. But is really badly known by most of people(I have by the way started a series of article to explain it: http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp). It's really difficult to be heard these days, but there is a new wave in XMPP world (check our project: http://salut-a-toi.org http://salut-a-toi.org or movim: http://movim.eu http://movim.eu).
_yy 11y ago
Not true, XMPP does have that feature and there are multiple clients which implement this. It works amazingly well. It's not an extension, but part of the standard. Example: http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/

robotkilla 11y ago

Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps. But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else. edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets

colanderman 11y ago
It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain. At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?
  - colanderman 11y ago
    Permanent user bans: http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on-users-with-3rd-party-apps-20150306/ http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on...
    - dest 11y ago
      I you can hack other's people accounts, it seems a good opportunity to force people out of WhatsApp. Just hack a guy's phone and connect him to WhatsApp through a third party client, get him permanently banned, and voilà!
  - simgidacav 11y ago
    Actually we see attempts to extend libpurple with many recent protocols. For instance telegram works on pidgin AFAIK, and I could recently see se a Tox plugin. Clearly we cannot play a fair game with the closed whatsapp, but hacking cannot be stopped or forbidden. After all, it was always like that. If you go back of 10 years al "regular people" had MSN and similar stuff, and we were IRCing. As a hacker, you migth feel sad, and think openness lost the war. IMHO the only difference is that nowadays we have much more "regular people" than before. They were simply sms-ing before they could access whatsapp.

mkhpalm 11y ago

Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.

tracker1 11y ago
I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop). It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun. These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion. I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
- ryukafalz 11y ago
  >I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well Matrix (http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.
welly 11y ago
> I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS) You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use. "Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.
jfim 11y ago
Of all the systems to transmit messages, SMS is probably the least proprietary. Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?

skarap 11y ago

Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests. Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.

colanderman 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.
- Too 11y ago
  Don't they already? Gmail was the embrace-extend phase. Now we are into extinguish. Try setting up your own email server, it will be marked as spam by most major webmail providers.
  - skarap 11y ago
    They still play good with the other few large email services. But with every year using google apps for business is becoming more and more obvious choice from economical POV. In fact I've myself recommended quite a few companies to "just use Google apps". I guess it just takes time too switch phases.
  - vbezhenar 11y ago
    I use my own server, and I can't say that everyone is marking me as a spam. With correct setup and a little bit of good history gmail works fine for me. I removed SPAM label from my mail in Gmail and asked few friends to do the same. Now my mail isn't marked as spam in gmail. And for yandex.ru and mail.ru it worked out of the box.
  - samuellb 11y ago
    I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails? They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.

kbenson 11y ago

I blame Apple[1]. Google's chat was free, but what happens when you have a free and open protocol, and your competitors don't? They consume your chats, but you can't consume theirs. Soon, your chat software can't compete. Apple has repeatedly chosen the path or proprietary when they could do open. They are Microsoft from the 90's with a better PR department. 1: I have little evidence beyond what looks obvious, but that could definitely be wrong. I'm open to new information proving me wrong.

nicklaf 11y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
corv 11y ago
In 2010 Jobs promised "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Afaik it didn't happen because of patent issues.
- Qantourisc 11y ago
  Patents prevent you from documenting, what is already documented in the patents ?!? I do however recognize the usage of the open standard would be limited by this. But one has options: other users could get a license, or one could try to change the protocol, to be able to avoid (some) patents, allowing both the patented and non patented way. To me it just feels like they just don't care enough.
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    Party A may have an agreement or indemnification clause from patent holder B, but they may not have the right to extend that to other parties. So when C comes along and implements party A's new thing, they leave themselves open to lawsuits from party B. Also, patents do not have to document everything. You can leave out some trade secrets, as long as the patent itself documents enough to prove it's a novel invention.
gurkendoktor 11y ago