[webteam] vendor lock-in, what the .... is it?

[Hal Rottenberg]

On 9/24/07, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at stpeter.im> wrote:
> There *are* clients that are locked down to a specific service. IMHO
> they are not of general interest (though they may be of interest to
> users of that service), so perhaps it doesn't make sense to list them at
> jabber.org anyway, because you could argue they are not jabber clients
> in the first place!

Wait a second, think this through some more.  There are more than a
few clients out there like this.  I can think of several examples off
the top of my head, and most involve mobile or micro clients.  On
those it can beneficial to move more processing to the server side.
Also, I've seen companies do the multi-protocol services on the server
side, kinda like Meebo.  In order to manage the integration of these
services (or any other arbitrary reason an individual or company
wants--it's a free planet), it can b ea perfectly valid scenario to
tie everything to a vendor-managed server.

And who says the software has to have a client-side piece at all?
What about web clients?

If I put more brainpower into it, I could think of more examples, but
I'll stop for now.

My point is this: if it speaks XMPP and it's considered a client, that
should be enough.  And if the vendor wishes to self-identify the
client's closed nature (in the description field), fine, and if not,
fine.  If a user wishes to add a comment to the node, fine.

If everyone feels we must have a field to track this, which I still
disagree with, at least come up with something better-sounding without
a negative connotation.

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