[Members] Civil Disobedience

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Nolan Eakins wrote:

> I stopped when I came to their community URL. Anyone have any qualms
> about making this an official JSF petition to Google?

I do.

One person's civil disobedience is another person's loose cannon. They 
officially released the service earlier today and you're jumping on them 
already? What's the problem with giving them time to work out some of 
the kinks first? Why the attack mode?

There are plenty of organizations and service providers using XMPP who 
are not connected to the open network or to each other -- in fact most 
of the big deployments are not interconnected. I agree that working 
toward federation of those deployments is important. But attacking 
Google, who at least has made a public committment to federation, is not 
the right way to make that happen. Have you ever heard the saying "you 
can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar"?

As I just said to a journalist I was chatting with, other than on the 
open Jabber network, federation is unheard of in the IM world. There are 
many problems with federation in the email world (even other than spam) 
and a lot of organizations don't want to get burned again. They want to 
get IM federation right. If that means developing some policies around 
server-to-server interconnection -- e.g., use TLS only and require that 
the other side have a non-self-signed certificate (perhaps using CAcert 
if we can get more people on board with that) -- then I think that makes 
sense. Google is taking a deliberate approach to federation and I see no 
reason to punish them for it.

If you want to send your complaint or make it an open letter, you are 
free to do so. But do not say that your opinion is representative of the 
JSF. And in any case, if the JSF is to formulate a position, it will 
need to be approved by the Board or by the full membership.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml