I’ve held back commenting about Google Talk, but since it’s the one-week anniversary, I’ll point out that the Dreamhost blog has the best explanation of what’s going on in that regard.

I’ll hold back chastising those of you still on the ‘walled garden’ chat systems since Google hasn’t opened up interoperability on their Jabber servers yet.

Update: Conversations in the comments are easy to miss, so here we go.

Ben wrote: I wonder if Jabber made a bad move by using transports to connect to other services. It doesn’t help people who use jabber to get their friends on jabber… It’s possible that jabber’s transports (which don’t work that great) overshadowed the real advantage of being able to talk to any other jabber server.

Well, it sounds like the age-old question: GPL or BSD? Do we enforce the idea that other people should do things the right way? Or do we just do our own thing and allow other people to interact with it as they please?

I think you’re right in a sense—if Jabber became really successful because of Google, it would probably become more widespread if it didn’t allow for interoperability.

But in the end the point isn’t to get the most people to use your protocol. (Well, that might be the point for AOL or MSN, but they just don’t get it.) The point is to be able to facilitate communication in the best possible manner. That’s why I think the BSD-ish allow-anything-and-interoperate approach fits better here.

(Note that this is a hugely different domain from software, and these arguments have nothing to do with the GPL vs the BSD license, just a particular application of the philosophy behind each. With software licenses it’s not just about interoperability—protecting freedoms also comes into play.)