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Cisco To Buy Jabber
Posted by
Soulskill
on Friday September 19, @07:10PM
from the swallowed-whole dept.
from the swallowed-whole dept.
Danny Rathjens writes "In the continuing trend of big companies buying out small companies with open source products, Cisco has announced that they are buying Jabber. The press release doesn't really talk about the open source aspect of Jabber, and Jabber's website doesn't mention the news yet. I'm sure the question many of us have is whether Jabber's open source status will be changed in any way due to the purchase."
Reader Eddytorial had this to contribute: "eWEEK offers a good look into how Jabber's messaging client will fit into Cisco Systems' overall 'presence' strategy in its market wars with Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel, and others. Cisco, which already had a basic instant messaging option, but one that didn't scale for an enterprise nearly as well as Jabber's, has just about everything else in place." It's also worth noting that Cisco open-sourced Etch in recent months.
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Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol 118 comments
Esther Schindler writes "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source. Certainly, it offers some technical benefits: 'In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.' And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. 'The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.'"
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Nothing new for Cisco (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.
Can I replace Chambers as the CEO?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.
Although I don't think that it's the case here Cisco also has a history of buying the competition and discontinuing their products. Buyouts can be a way to increase your engineering staff.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Cisco's entire marketing strategy is to buy out companies of products they wish they had and then rebrand and sell them.
Can I replace Chambers as the CEO?
Cisco's done that along. pretty much every product line besides routers has been an acquisition
Cisco integration finally? (Score:4, Funny)
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Cisco? (Score:3, Funny)
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Jabber Inc (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to note that Cisco is only buying Jabber Inc. XMPP is an open standard, so anyone can implement their own client or server, and lots of people have. That's not going to change, regardless of what Cisco does.
Furthermore, Jabber Inc's XCP server isn't even open source. I suspect that other Jabber servers such as the open source jabberd and ejabberd are much more commonly used in the open source community.
So Cisco's acquisition of Jabber Inc really has no impact on the Jabber/XMPP open source community. In fact, continuing to develop Jabber XCP as a commercial product can only help push the adoption of XMPP, which is good for everyone.
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Re:Jabber Inc (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Jabber Inc (Score:4, Funny)
Jabber Inc was never a huge player in the Jabber scene. They're just a company that snatched the name Jabber after a similarly named protocol was invented.
Well, at least it worked for fooling Cisco.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3)
I dont think it brings anything to the table for them. The higher-ups and bean counters wanted to "own" some part of this new protocol but you cant buy an open standard. So they just bought this firm and put it on the big list of "technologies we bought." Now Jabber isnt some hackey protocol, its a respectable product from a smart acquisition. Someone at Cisco is no doubt getting promoted for wasting money. Perhaps this purchase indemnifies them in some legal way I dont quite understand.
To be fair, they a
Re:Jabber Inc (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cisco (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco already provides phones, PBX, etc. and tools to mix your voicemail and e-mail into one system. Buying an IM company allows them to offer voicemail, e-mail, and IM on one platform. However they could have just used Jabber without buying it, unless they intend to end the open source licensing.
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Re:Cisco (Score:4, Insightful)
Or if they just wanted a good way to get engineers who know their way around a particular family of technology, and who have a successful name backing them up...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>unless they intend to end the open source licensing.
Jabber XCP is not OSS
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Cisco already has a presence product as part of it's unified communications offering. I think it's based on SIP and SIMPLE, though, rather than XMPP. Perhaps this acquisition was in recognition of the prevalence of XMPP as a standard. In this light, I think the announcement bodes welll for all XMPP based products.
Interestingly, the Jabber XCP appears to have been expressly engineered and marketed to integrate nicely with other Cisco products, such as WebEx and MeetingPlace. So maybe none of this should
Just to stab Avaya a little bit more (Score:5, Interesting)
At Avaya's latest trade conference this spring (Avaya is Cisco's largest competitor in the PBX/VoIP/Video scape), Avaya introduced a very large partnership with Jabber Inc., to help with presence solutions (Avaya's presence solution, while based on SIMPLE/SIP, is not very well supported outside the SIP world). They were expected to release their product sometime this fall, that would allow true presence aggregation and integration with their many VoIP and Video products.
As of this morning, these partnerships are dead, along with these revolutionary products. Official word is "This acquisition will not harm Avaya or Nortel's existing presence products, but further development on partnership products will no longer continue."
I guess Cisco won't fall behind in this realm after all.
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I nearly feinted when I read that (Score:4, Funny)
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Smart Move (Score:3, Interesting)
With a few tweaks to make it acceptable to the enterprise instant messaging market, Cisco has a very salable product. Companies have been trying to kill off the AIM and Yahoo IM clients for some time because of the security risk they pose. They haven't succeeded because the enterprise IM clients don't meet an appropriate standard of quality and don't interact with anybody else's IM product.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
but whether Cisco will try to be all redactive and decide that the open source licensing of current and previous versions of jabber (which for most people works perfectly well as it is) are unforkable and/or non-distributable.
Ummm... How many companies have managed to successfully stop all forks of a product without killing the current product?
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Ummm... How many companies have managed to successfully stop all forks of a product without killing the current product?
Heh, like Lucid Emacs?
Re:Or.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't much matter whether they try or not. I don't know of any even remotely common OSS licences that can be retroactively rescinded. They can certainly stop releasing under an OSS licence, and they could, if they felt like it, pull all the mirrors they control quite suddenly; but if somebody else has a copy that has been released under an OSS licence, they can't do much of anything about it.
But how can you 'buy the rights' to a program and then close source it? Did they find each and every developer that contributed to Jabber and get him/her/them to allow Cisco to have their 'share' in the ownership?
If I release a cool product under Open Source, and then 50 other developers contribute to it--how can I sell the license to use their work and close source it?
Re:Or.... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Jabber Inc owns Jabber XCP, which is closed already.
Jabberd 1.4 and Jabberd2 are not owned, controlled or even affiliated with Jabber Inc. Openfire and ejabberd are likewise not connected to Jabber Inc. Furthermore, all are FOSS and the license cannot be revoked.
As for XMPP itself, it is managed by the independent, non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation, and the core of XMPP also exists as several Standards Track IETF RFCs.
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Re: (Score:2)
I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted, but whether Cisco will try to be all redactive
Bah.
THEY^H^H^H^HWE CANNOT DO THAT.
Any questions?
Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, primarily supporting Open Source within the company. I do not speak for Cisco.
Re:When in doubt, fork off. (Score:4, Informative)
How does stuff like this get post and modded insightful, when there are already numerous post stating that:
1. the protocol is open
2. OSS licenses can't be retroactively revoked
3. The Jabber Inc product, Jabber XCP, is not and never has been Open Source.
4. There are 3 or 4 major OSS xmpp servers already, and several smaller ones (and none of these have been bought).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1. the protocol is open
The core protocol, anyway. Being based on XML, it allows arbitrary extensions. Apple extended it in a few ways and didn't document them, breaking compatibility. Google extended them and did document their changes.
3. The Jabber Inc product, Jabber XCP, is not and never has been Open Source.
It's not even very good. It's less feature-complete and less scalable than eJabberd.
4. There are 3 or 4 major OSS xmpp servers already, and several smaller ones (and none of these have been bought).
Jabberd is unmaintained, Jabberd2 is a mess, OpenIM is probably okay but getting Java working on my server was too much effort for me to seriously evaluate it. eJabberd is a very nice piece of software though.