FUD Fighters

by Peter Saint-Andre

2002-09-03

Yesterday discussion broke out on Slashdot about last Friday's CNET article regarding Jabber and the IETF. The FUD was flying fast and furious (to be charitable, what sounded an awful lot like FUD may have been merely a big bunch of serious misunderstandings). Check out the comments and you'll see that Jabber old-timers like me and temas were actively fighting the good fight there for a while. Hopefully we cleared things up and helped a few more people understand what Jabber is all about.

One of the main FUD-like issues revolved around whether Jabber Inc. has patents over Jabber technology, to which the answer is a resounding no. As I said in my last post:

Jabber Inc. does not (and almost certainly never will) hold patents related to Jabber. However it does assert copyright over its own code. When Joe said "IPR" he meant copyright, but others took that to mean patents. So one more time, y'all sing along with the chorus: "There are no Jabber patents!"

And as I said in my penultimate post:

As both Joe Hildebrand (Jabber Inc. Chief Architect) and I explained, Jabber Inc. holds copyright on the code it has written (who wouldn't copyright their own code?). Jabber Inc. does not hold patents on implementations of the Jabber protocol, it has not applied for such patents, it does not intend to apply for such patents, and even if it or some other entity wanted to apply for such patents, they would not be granted because the open-source jabberd server and various Jabber clients would certainly be counted as prior art. Ergo the concerns raised about Jabber Inc. or some other company squelching development of open-source or commercial code compliant with the Jabber protocol are entirely without foundation. So take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy the Jabber goodness already. :)

We won't even talk about what I said in my antepenultimate post! (But seriously, how often do you get to use the word 'antepenultimate', eh?)


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