Open Discussion Day : May 19th

By | 2007/05/19
3 Comments

I want to remind everyone that today is the second annual Open Discussion Day. The day where we celebrate and advocate open protocols and computing standards. One year ago today I set the goal to stop using proprietary “closed” IM protocols. Today I only use Jabber and I don’t miss the others. My friends and family can still contact me. They can still email me and the world has continued its orbital motion.

I invite everyone to participate in one of the following today (and hopefully into the future!):

  1. If you’ve partially moved yourself to the open chat protocol Jabber make the switch complete.
  2. If you don’t have a Jabber account go ahead and make one. Check out Jabber or even use your gmail account over Jabber. (see instructions here)
  3. Invite a friend to use Jabber whether it be via a new Jabber account or a gmail account. Spread the word and celebrate!

This year I plan on extending my goal to other open protocols and continue to set a personal standard and example to those around me.

  1. I will continue to advocate the use of Jabber.
  2. I will dedicate bandwidth and torrent seeds to the OpenOffice project download.
  3. I will support the Ogg Vorbis format and hardware that supports it.

I know it is a late reminder for those of you in Europe but for you in the US there is still time in the day to start a change.  I invite you to pick something from the list–something you feel you can accomplish–and set it in motion.  Protocols, standards and free software can’t continue to grow without each of us.  Please try to do your part and celebrate Open Discussion Day!

3 thoughts on “Open Discussion Day : May 19th”

  1. Pollywog

    I think it is interesting that most of the Linux related forums have a “Profile” section for users to add their messenger information (ICQ, Yahoo Mess, AIM, etc) but there is no box for Jabber. I prefer Jabber over ICQ primarily because ICQ is not doing anything about abuse and I get lots of ICQ spam disguised as AUTH requests.

  2. boombox

    I am using the Windows Live Messenger instead of any of those alternatives. I might use something else if the features I really need would be available..

    First of all, offline instant messaging. It’s actually pretty usable and handy. You can write quick comments to your friends and when they login they get them and can answer instantly with the im application adn we can continue chatting on that topic. No more forgeting to bring up a matter later.

    The second is the audio/video support. I’m personally at this moment living in an other country than my wifey. With the outrageous roaming and phone rates and fixed price internet connection I’m using constantly either Skype or Messenger. That will save me monthly couple hundred euros of money.

    Now, I could in theory use some other client for just the text based im stuff and then run also Skype/messenger for the rest. But that means I will be adding more constantly running applications and since the Skype/messenger already have the im features as well and the other parties have to run them as well, it is in overall pretty stupid solution.

    File transfer is naturally also a must-have feature. Couldn’t really live without it.

    What is furthermore very nice in Skype and Messenger is that they can work from behind extremely broken internet connections. They can handle silly nats and firewall setups made by incompetent network administrators quite fine, and just work. There are places where the other im/chat applications just break.

    Yeah, if the jabber im applications were better I’d use them instantly and never look back. The fact that they lack some of the most important features for such applications have just always put me and many other people off.

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