Comments on: AIM Network Now Open!

By: Nikolas Coukouma

Nikolas Coukouma — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 02:50:10 +0000

I sent an e-mail to one of the developers about the points that seemed absurd, and posted his answers (with permission, and after he checked with the lawyers)

By: julian

julian — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 00:09:25 +0000

Jens, I understand the difference, but I still believe it to be a rather deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. I have been asked by several people already what the point of Jabber is if AIM is now an open protocol…

It certainly crossed my mind that they may have intended to use the term “open” as in OpenDoc or the Open Group, but these days “open” is much more attached to open source (OpenOffice, OpenSSH, OpenBSD, OpenDarwin, Open Directory, OpenCourseWare … just google “open”).

I understand that the open source movement doesn’t have anything close to a trademark on the term “open,” and that “Open AIM” would very well make sense to third party Windows developers who want to extend the official AIM client, but the news of this “Open AIM” was not covered in that fashion, so I did not cover it in that fashion myself.

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 22:17:38 +0000

Julian, I think you’re confusing the term “open” with “open source”. “Open” has been used a lot longer in the industry, to mean any system (proprietary or not) that has public APIs that you can write plug-ins or extensions with, i.e. OpenDoc. It was really popular in the early ’90s, while I don’t think Eric Raymond coined “open source” until about 1996, as a deliberate reaction to Stallman’s “free software”, to make it sound more palatable to the business world.

By: julian

julian — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:10:07 +0000

Nikolas, it looks like you’re right, I glossed over that a bit much. Perhaps it would be possible to use the SDK with an Open Source license that does not subject the SDK to *any* obligations.

By: Nikolas Coukouma

Nikolas Coukouma — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:17:56 +0000

The part you elided in the anti-open-source part seems important:
“incorporates any Publicly Available Software, in whole or in part, in a manner that may subject the Tools or the AOL Services, in whole or in part, to all or part of the license obligations of any Publicly Available Software.”
I guess you’re arguing that you can’t use even well-understood licenses, due to the “may”?

By: julian

julian — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:29:36 +0000

Andreas, the issue at hand wasn’t using it with the GPL (there are many other reasons that wouldn’t be ok), but that adding that Publicly Available Software clause, AOL made it impossible to use this SDK with any sort of Open Source license.

The Open Source world is much broader than just the GPL.

And Sander, people point how how unenforceable this stuff is in Canada or the EU every single time I talk about it. If you guys are so proud that it’s not enforceable there, you should do something about it and shove it in the faces of these companies. Break their license if it’s legal for you to do so, and make sure it’s popularized. My guess is that most countries don’t particularly want to get into a legal battle with AOL Time Warner, though, and neither do most citizens. It doesn’t particularly matter whether or not it’s legal, you’d end up spending a lot of money either way. Technical legalities are different from “what would make me spend a lot of time and money in court”.

By: Sander

Sander — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:49:12 +0000

“Nah, that’s already forbidden elsewhere in the agreement.”

AFAIK such a rule is not enforceable by law in the EU.

By: Andreas Ehn

Andreas Ehn — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:14:57 +0000

By forbidding the use of the SDK in multi-protocol clients AOL implicitly makes it impossible to use the SDK in any project using the GPL anyway, since the GPL normally prevents you from applying any additional constraints on what people can do with your code, such as turning your AIM-only client into a multi-protocol client. (Of course there are open-source and free-software licenses besides the GPL that are less strict.)

By: julian

julian — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 15:37:21 +0000

“I suppose the big reason behind that rule, is that they maybe fear very good Jabber transports.”

Nah, that’s already forbidden elsewhere in the agreement. You can forbid connecting to multiple IM systems without forbidding use in any form of open source software. They went out of their way to make sure this couldn’t be used with open source, even if the open source license is friendly with commercial software. (Just as they went out of their way to ensure you couldn’t use this in software which connects to other networks—even forbidding use on any form of mobile device just in case)

By: Sander

Sander — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 14:37:07 +0000

Idea: related open-source projects can add a banner or something to their webpage/software:

“Despite the claimed openess of AOL, AIM is not yet open. As a result this project cannot take advantage of their so-called ‘openess’. Please contact AOL if you want to know when they really will open their network.”