From: eirikur@mail.flashcom.net
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 12:34:55 PDT
I'm lacking a clue about the IM wars.
I set up my sister and nephews with Linux the other day, replacing an
aged Mac. They seem to be happily living their IM lives using gAIM, the
Gnome AIM client. I don't think there is an official AOL IM client for
Linux.
So, what's this about AOL locking out other vendors? I assume they could
reverse-engineer the protocol just as the gAIM people did. That keeps the
server database in the hands of AOL, of course, but how could you
interoperate with AOL IM users without talking to their server? How
could an AOL IM client respond to you if you don't have an AOL IM account?
Does the buddy list somehow turn into IP addresses so that you don't go through the server? That can't be the case because AOL knows what
the throughput is.
Something I don't understand was working to enable Tribal Voice, etc,
to work before AOL started blocking them. I understand that CMGI wants
to see the database (feed it to Engage), but I have been assuming that
that was orthoganal to the interoperability issue.
Is the issue one of wanting to have a non-AOL server interoperate with
AOL by sending messages to "bill@aol-im" so that I wouldn't have to have
an AOL IM account? How does an AOL client send messages out of the AOL IM namespace in that case?
I could probably be clued-in with a couple of lines about how this works.
Eirikur
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