You're again behind :P

1) I fixed the URLs of all Jive projects on Ohloh to the specific product pages. It makes no sense to point to a site that lists several projects...it would be similar as using http://sourceforge.net/ as the website of Coccinella because the sourcecode is hosted by them. I'm pretty sure that will also increase  that project's ranking. That Jive Software does not has easy URLs to the direct projects and prefers to only have a link the site that lists all their projects is there choice. Nobody said it is impossible to do something like: http://project.igniterealtime.org/

3) And this is one that got my goat a bit. :-P You forgot to tell that the igniterealtime forums includes a lot messages from customers from before Jive Messenger was open-sourced, that the igniterealtime forums also includes messages of Jive's other open-source projects, that ejabberd has more documentation which lowers the needs to ask questions already answered in this documentation, that ejabberd has more decentralised support channels (e.g. mailing list, other websites with support).

PS: at least ejabberd has a more independent community than Openfire, in the sense of control by one instance. E.g. to contribute to ejabberd you don't have to sign documents like you have to do with Openfire as Jive wants to release your code also as closed source in order to have a competititve advantage over other competitors that want to fork Openfire. Of course that doesn't means the ejabberd community has no troubles regarding independency, but at least it is still a lot better. Note that I plan to blog about these troubles in the future. Let's hope things improve then. So, what I want to say with this is that I'm pretty sure ejabberd contains (relatively) more code from independent contributors than Openfire.

So Openfire is better because they stuff all of the useful "Enterprise" features and charge a fee for that edition?

Personally, I like the Jive model.  OF alone has more features and is easier to use than a number of other servers.  I generally use it for my home server, but its flexibility has awed me so much so that we're considering a deployment here at work.  Since I work for a regulated company, we're investigating the compliance requirements and features of OF enteprise.

The professional touch on the software is much appreciated and I believe its value is that much higher as a result.

"The biggest problem with ejabberd is that its written in Erlang." Irronically, it is also the base of ejabberd's strategic advantages, the source of its distinguishing key features.

The key thing what I hate about Jive's open-source model is that it is way too similar to the MySQL model (which I also hate). I prefer the Linux and the PostgreSQL models. The big difference between the first and the last 2 models is that in the first model you are still dependent on 1 company for your software, while in the second and third model you can rely on other companies and/or independent community members that have a stake in the software project.

So, do not understand me wrong, I'm not saying that Jive's model results in bad quality software. I'm just saying that you can't switch to another company (or hire independent community members) if you think Jive's support does not fit anymore for our organization for whatever reason (user lock-in). So, then you have to switch to other software which means (high) switching costs.

btw: what happened with my other 2 comments to this blog post?

"The key thing what I hate about Jive???s open-source model is that it is way too similar to the MySQL model (which I also hate). I prefer the Linux and the PostgreSQL models."

MySQL's model is meant to provide free software, but at the same time generate revenue from software through commercial licenses.  Linux and PostgreSQL are not businesses, and don't have to generate revenue. 

"The big difference between the first and the last 2 models is that in the first model you are still dependent on 1 company for your software, while in the second and third model you can rely on other companies and/or independent community members that have a stake in the software project."

This is not true.  Anybody can provide MySQL support if they want, just as anyone can provide Linux and PostgreSQL support.  Look at CentOS vs Red Hat.  Red Hat sells a Linux distribution but, because it's based on free software code, anyone can basically take everything they've done (that's also free software) and build a competing product.  CentOS happens to do it for free, but there's nothing to say that they couldn't base a commercial product off the same code.

As far as Jive requiring people to sign agreements, that's standard practice among many businesses.  It protects them from legal issues later, and if I'm not mistaken, a number of open source / free software projects do this even when business isn't involved.  It also allows the project to open up their code more in the future, rather than closing it up, and the license can never be revoked on code that's already GPLed or whatever.  So if OpenFire 3.3.0 is GPLed, it can never be un-GPLed.  Though, it would be possible to un-GPL 3.3.1, anyone who desired could base a competing or new product off the original, GPLed code-base.

Personally, I prefer OpenFire over any other XMPP server implementation.  ejabberd was a pain in the butt, and I got tired of the developers touting their own horn at every opportunity.  I expect some of that from everyone, because obviously everyone wants to be happy about their accomplishments.  But with the ejabberd community, the excessive self-congratulation got to be rather annoying.  This whole post is a direct result of that silliness.

"MySQL???s model is meant to provide free software, but at the same time generate revenue from software through commercial licenses. Linux and PostgreSQL are not businesses, and don???t have to generate revenue."

Well, these projects are indeed no businesses. Instead, there are several companies that contribute to Linux, PostgreSQL (look on their website for commercial support), amongst a lot other projects AND these companies make money from these projects. Recently, I read that most of the contributions to Linux were made by companies. Is this a problem? No, because it are a lot companies including competitors; none of them controls the project; the project is independent.

"This is not true. Anybody can provide MySQL support if they want, just as anyone can provide Linux and PostgreSQL support."

Though, this is technically true, businesses that want to do that have several major disadvantages over MySQL (the same is true for Jive) that makes competition with MySQL difficult:

• They cannot provide a closed source version as MySQL can do (from their website: "With that said, we recommend the commercial license to all commercial and government organizations. This frees you from the broad and strict requirements of the GPL license.")

hmmm, could it be that there is a bug in this blog software?: my last message was cut in the middle it seems

"If you don???t agree with the terms of contributing code, either don???t contribute it, or fork and make your own version where you can do what you like with your own code."

Regarding the forking , that was actually in the second part of my message that was lost. I'll try to restore the copy in my mind later today. In short: forking Jive's projects a extremely hard compared to independent projects. Plus, forking in general is already hard.

"There???s also absolutely nothing stopping anyone from creating plugins that provide the features comparable to OpenFire???s Enterprise edition, but in such a way that they???re free for everyone to use."

But that is limited to plugins, architucture changes e.g. are impossible with that. Jive keeps control over that.

"My opinion is that all of this worrying about licensing issues is just that. Worrying. I???d say it???s also completely beside the point for the majority of users who are simply going to use the software, rather than develop for it."

Well, some months ago I read a message in the forums by the Tigase developer that his code got into Openfire without his permission. This would have been no problem when Jive did not dual-licensed Openfire because then they didn't needed his permission.

"Regarding the forking , that was actually in the second part of my message that was lost. I???ll try to restore the copy in my mind later today. In short: forking Jive???s projects a extremely hard compared to independent projects. Plus, forking in general is already hard."

Forking is always difficult, but if you want something in the project that the owner won't do, it's pretty much the only option.  This is true for all free software projects, not just ones that do dual-licensing.

"But that is limited to plugins, architucture changes e.g. are impossible with that. Jive keeps control over that."

Again, this is true for all free software.  If you want something incorporated into Linux that the kernel developers don't want, or you want to add a new feature to PostgreSQL that the developers don't want to add, you have no choice but to either offer it as a third-party patch, or fork the code base.  The same goes for ejabberd.  But you can make architecture changes to OpenFire all you like, though Jive may or may not be interested in incorporating them into the final release.

"Well, some months ago I read a message in the forums by the Tigase developer that his code got into Openfire without his permission. This would have been no problem when Jive did not dual-licensed Openfire because then they didn???t needed his permission."

I don't know anything about this issue, but I'd imagine it was a mistake, though one that can happen with any project if the license isn't the same or compatible with the license of the submitted code.  This isn't a problem with OpenFire being dual-licensed, but rather a problem with accepting code.  It's also not much different than somebody's non-GPLed code being incorporated into a GPL project without their permission (and it happens).

grin  I hate to break up the fun here, but wouldn't the time spent arguing here be better spent improving each's favorite XMPP server?    And curse you Daniel for having my same name!  ;D  I am the only one who's allowed to be called Daniel . . . just like EST is the only true time zone!

(just trying to lighten the mood    )

Hahahah  open standards, open names!

Wonder what the source code to the name Daniel looks like.

Hopefully it's not written in visual basic.

All in all, and on a more serious note, I am always glad to see a bunch of good well liked XMPP servers out there with their own followings.  What fun would it be if there were only one server implementation?  We can all learn from each other and since we are forced to approach scenarios differently by the sheer nature of the languages we are using or the architecture we have chosen, we can see problems approached in different ways.  All of this is great for making the XMPP standards rock solid if you ask me.

So everyone raise a glass to your favorite server and ALL of the XMPP servers out there.  wpjabber, jabberd1, jabberd2, openim, openfire, ejabberd, djabberd, tigase, and whatever else I'm missing!  Kudos to all of ya!

I'll sorta re-reply to the one post, since it wasn't all there when I replied before.

"Though, this is technically true, businesses that want to do that have several major disadvantages over MySQL (the same is true for Jive) that makes competition with MySQL difficult:

• They cannot provide a closed source version as MySQL can do (from their website: ???With that said, we recommend the commercial license to all commercial and government organizations. This frees you from the broad and strict requirements of the GPL license.???)

• They cannot influence the roadmap without forking (which is made extremely costly, see further), so they have no control and cannot adapt to all their customers needs

• There is a big threat for them when another company, which isn???t that friendly to them, acquires MySQL.

Regarding the last point, I found next interesting article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1930346,00.asp Just imagine what would happen when Microsoft???s Live departement acquires Jive Software???"

These are all risks to using free software, whether there are closed-source versions of the same products or not.  If Microsoft bought Jive, then we'd still have the last version of OpenFire that was released as free software, and could build on it from there.  Is it a risk?  Perhaps.  But in my opinion, not in the way you portray it.

"What do you mean with this? Can you explain? If I understand you right, I???m afraid to tell you that your employer started with posting something that is more excessive than Process-One???s last post: http://web.archive.org/web/20050810235429/www.jivesoftware.org/messenger/status_ report_2_2.jsp"

Jive isn't my employer, but I think you know that now.   I look at that post, and I don't see anything that's particularly excessive as far as self-congratulation is concerned.  But, a few tidbits from the Process One blog:

• http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/according_to_ohloh_ejabberd_the_most _popular_open_source_xmpp_server/

• http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/ejabberd_passes_the_120000_download_ mark/

• http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/angie_millions_users_instant_messagi ng/

• http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/ejabberd_4th_birthday/

Not everything in the aforementioned posts is bad.  I agree with many of the things that Process One says.  But, seemingly arbitrary milestones and benchmarks, assertations that ejabberd is the "best" or "fastest" or "most scalable" at various things at various times.  Various XMPP mailing lists have had many similar posts, and my personal opinion is that it gets old.

Does Jive say similar things about OpenFire?  Yes, they do at times.  But normally, from what I've seen, it's not often as "we're the best", "we're number one", "zomg we pwnz j00", but rather pointing out specific areas where their software has filled a need very well, and proclaimed that they have been successful in those areas.  There's a difference.

Perhaps it's something lost in translation, or the fact that most of the OpenFire/Jive things are written from more of a business perspective.  I can only take so much of somebody tooting their own horn and pretending that everyone else is inferior to them.  It's tiresome, and that's where I take issue with it.

"* Fragmentation: It???s just a matter of time until Erlang-based transports will arrive. In fact I know some individuals that started with such transports. Fragmentation in transport projects is IMO a problem because it is a waste of developer resources in the community; these transport projects are temporary (until these networks become XMPP compatible, which already happened with Sametime, if I am right!)"

I don't see the big networks becoming XMPP compatible in the near future.  But, you mention that fragmentation in transports is a problem, then go on to talk about people writing transports in erlang.  Why?  Why not contribute to the existing Py* transports?  Or is it so they can be ejabberd specific, like the OpenFire transport plugin?

"These consequences were predictable, so I guess this was done by intention. That???s why I get so angry when Jive Software???s PR shouts about its care for the Jabber community :-s It also explains my passionate posts over here, because I DO CARE about the Jabber community."

To my knowledge, Jive has been fairly active on the various XMPP mailing lists, has worked on a number of XEPs, has been very open to ideas from the community, and has given a lot away to the community as well when they really didn't have to.  I don't know how much support they get from outside developers, but Jive doesn't appear to me to have any problems being successful on their own.  Their forum software is used by a multitude of large corporations all across the Internet.  I think they're interested in real-time communication and the flexibility of XMPP, and honestly want to see it succeed.  Any extra push XMPP gets can't do anything but benefit Jive in the long run.

I don't work on any XMPP software, nor do I work for any XMPP-related company.  I've been a Jabber user for years and years, and have been running a public server for a fairly long time as well (off and on, on mostly the past two years or so).  I know what works for me and what doesn't, and OpenFire has been the biggest blessing to me and many other server administrators.  Of course it has flaws, and things that could be done better, but it's a work in progress and so far has done nothing but improve.  Yes, Jive sells a commercial version of the server too.  What does this do?  It gets more companies involved in XMPP than they would normally be, because they have a company to work with for support, customization, etc.  It's not a bad thing, and my opinion is that it strengthens the community as a whole.

Hi,

really funny how people care about page ranking within yahoo/ohloh. As the last ejabberd release with new features (1.1.0) is a year old one may really wonder how active the project is and if new features will be added. This may be much more interesting than a ranking based on links or a feature comparison. Having said this I should add that I don't like projects which release new versions every three weeks as no one has the time to do 20 software updates within a year, four releases within a year are usually enough.

LG

"I look at that post, and I don???t see anything that???s particularly excessive as far as self-congratulation is concerned."

Besides the mentioning of the feature score on jabber.org without telling that this is based on subjective feature measurements, in particular this: "The discussion forums have become very busy. .. The Jive Messenger community is much more active than any of the other XMPP/Jabber Open Source projects. Below are some statistics generated by the Jive Forums instance at jivesoftware.org between May 1, 2005 and July 24, 2005."

At the time I read this, I was pissed of because this claim was (and is?) for sure unfair to ejabberd for next reasons:

1) How can they know it is more active? They don't have any stats of other projects.

2) They forget to tell that the Jive forums were mostly attended by customers from before the open-sourcing of Jive Messenger; the forums already were busy, this had nothing to do with the open-source community as probably most of these people asking questions at that time in the forums bought the closed-source version and were asking questions about that.

3) Jive does forget to tell that other open-source projects are more decentralised regarding support (different support websites in different languages, different mailing lists where you could find help, multiple chat rooms that were always open,...)

"But, a few tidbits from the Process One blog:

But, seemingly arbitrary milestones and benchmarks, assertations that ejabberd is the ???best??? or ???fastest??? or ???most scalable??? at various things at various times. Various XMPP mailing lists have had many similar posts, and my personal opinion is that it gets old."

Well, what is wrong with telling the things anybody can verify using benchmarks? At the time of these benchmarks (and probably still), ejabberd was (and is still?) the fastest and most scalable open-source Jabber server (not "open-source", as it only was tested with open-source servers!). Regarding "best", I don't see any problem with that; any company will claim it has the best product/service... (and then you know at least some of this is probably true, at least in their eyes) So: "fastest" and "most scalable" can be measured, while "best" is an objective thing.

btw: a fun thing that is true for some of the Process-One posts you mention, is that after a few days you could see on the Jive blog a post regarding some number of forum posts, number of downloads of Jive software, or other statistical information. There's nothing wrong with replies to blog posts, but Jive does not seem to know that it is common use in the blog world to mention and link to the blog article you are replying to :o)

"I can only take so much of somebody tooting their own horn and pretending that everyone else is inferior to them."

See "Jive Messenger Project Status (August 2, 2005)" and in particular the note I made about it. For sure at that time Jive Messenger had not the most activity with an open-source origin, it was not even 3th in the rankings I guess.

"I don???t see the big networks becoming XMPP compatible in the near future."

I'm more ambitious Do not forget Google has already one of the semi-major networks...

"But, you mention that fragmentation in transports is a problem, then go on to talk about people writing transports in erlang. Why? Why not contribute to the existing Py* transports?"

Because it is more easy to start new transports than it is to revive semi-dead projects; we've seen the same with the C-based projects, do you remember?

"Or is it so they can be ejabberd specific, like the OpenFire transport plugin?"

http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/from_jabber_to_xmpp_im_standard_conv ergence/ --> @Matt: this was not written by me and it seems straightforward that there is a hidden complaint to Jive's way of "helping" the community in it (cfr: ???It???s clear that Sander???s viewpoints are not mainstream, which I???ve certainly found to be true in my interactions with the larger XMPP/Jabber community.???) So, please do not do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem I try to give some - yes, negative - feedback.

http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/epeios_write_a_module_for_an_xmpp_se rver_once_run_it_everywhere/ --> "Epeios allows to run an ejabberd module on any XMPP server supporting the component protocol." (so, this is IMO a major difference with Jive: giving back to the broader Jabber community instead of harming the Jabber community nd binding users to Openfire)

"To my knowledge, Jive has been fairly active on the various XMPP mailing lists, has worked on a number of XEPs, has been very open to ideas from the community, and has given a lot away to the community as well when they really didn???t have to."

I do not try to convince people that Jive does nothing good, I just try to make some things more visible to people that seems to be very conflicting with Jive's claim that they do not want to harm the broader Jabber community. (btw: this makes me think about another example: the unfair promotion of Spark by only making the automatically network deployment using Openfire available for Spark instead of making this feature client independent)

Hey Sander.  Not sure if you remember me, but we've chatted in both the ejabberd forums and on some MUC sessions in the past.  (I've run ejabberd on Windows for some time now.)

Anyway, I think most folks involved with the Jabber/XMPP community at large know who you are, as you're quite prolific on both forums and mailing lists.  You're obviously very passionate about ejabberd, and that's great.  And I don't doubt your intentions are honorable.  But having said that, if you read this thread not from your own eyes, but as a person who just visited the www.igniterealtime.org website or as a Jive/Wildfire/Openfire user/admin, let's just say you're doing both yourself and the ejabberd community a disservice.

Being a loyal fan of some software project is one thing.  But doing so to the detriment of others is another.  Regarding Daniel (jadestorm) being "lured away" (my expression here) by money...no!  Say it isn't so!  A programmer who would like to be paid so they can eat and have a reasonable living?  The insanity of it all!  Even Linus Torvalds has (gasp) taken a job where they pay him money.  Crazy.  Seriously, though, what Daniel chose to do is HIS choice and should be respected.  Let's face it.  Open-source is great, but it won't by itself put food on the table.  And whether we like it or not, we still gotta eat.

And regarding Jive making plugins that only work with OpenFire and not for all XMPP servers...I don't even know where to begin.  Besides the fact that each XMPP server implementation uses a different gateway interface (assuming they have one), making doing so quite the challenge, this is a bit over the top.  Jive is a business.  That it uses the MySQL business model is their choice.  That they pay people to write software for their products is, quite frankly, only logical.  Does it suck for the Py* community?  Sure.  Is it "fair"?  Maybe not.  But life's not fair.  Get over it.  Do what you can for the things in life that matter to you.

I mean, some folks might consider the fact that you're sitting here, on a "competitor's" website writing blog entries, to be a