[recoiledsnake]

Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outlook.com users to chat with Gtalk friends and is rolling out that feature? Am I right? Someone tell me I am wrong!

That sounds unbelievable, coming from the supposedly open company even though it's coming on the heels of them trying lock out millions of Windows Phone users from Youtube by sending a C&D takedown on the app.

I guess open standards don't work when you're the guy trying to lock in users. If Google had a lock-in on Office products, looks like they will ditch "open data" and "open standards" in a heartbeat. They should change their policy to "open when it's convenient for us to flog it for PR purposes, else closed, oh and please store all your office documents on our cloud, we make it really convenient.".

This is not Open vs. Closed anymore, this is Corporations vs. Individuals, except for Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.

And Web DRM? Of course it's coming because IE, Chrome and Safari are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with th h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google said it would drop H.264 from Chrome but did not and Mozilla was left holding the short end of the stick and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.

I can picture Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix etc executives sitting at a bar and giving toast to each other and laughing while we whine and debate fruitlessly with vitriol on these forums. All their stock valuations are up recently!

[codeka]

> That sounds unbelievable

It's unbelievable because it's not true. They're dropping XMPP federation, which outlook.com never used anyway.

What outlook.com has done is they've added an XMPP client that lets you connect to Google's servers in order to send chat messages to GTalk users. That's still going to work.

Also note that what Microsoft have done is allow outlook.com users to communicate with GTalk users, but not the other way around.

[sp332]

They dropped XMPP federation a couple of months ago. The new move is away from XMPP entirely. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714557

[uxp]

They also restored it only a month ago, claiming they temporarily had to disable it to counter a large spam issue.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-reinstates-federate...

[recoiledsnake]

This thread says otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714681

[untog]

That thread of unsourced speculation, you mean?

[rst]

It's sourced. That's a reply to a thread based here, which starts by quoting email from Google which says point blank that "the new [hangouts] service will not support XMPP".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714557

[mortehu]

From the post you linked:

> Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP. XMPP clients will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.

> Note that the changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients

[rst]

But not with the new Hangouts service, which was announced to great ballyhoo in the Google I/O keynote yesterday as their new, general-use chat system for the vast bulk of their userbase. Which is what this whole conversation is about.

[cooldeal]

Ugh, and someone else states that XMPP will be disabled for users who chose to upgrade to hangouts.

Why this utter confusion over a simple thing after a whole three hour keynote yesterday and today no one seems to have a clue? Communication fail, if you ask me.

Color me skeptical, but there was similar confusion when SMS search stopped working suddenly,and then people realized Google killed it. XMPP support may stay, but I am not going to bet more than 2 bucks on it.

[icebraining]

trying to lock out millions of Windows Phone users from Youtube by sending a C&D takedown on the app

Open browser → type youtube.com. How exactly are they "locked out"? Please stop throwing FUD; whether they should provide API access is a fair discussion, but let's not make stuff up.

[Metrop0218]

Locked out is definitely way too strong of a phrase. "Make it less comfortable to use" is a bit closer to truth

[VikingCoder]

So, to be clear, Google is supposed to make video chat with groups of people, recording to YouTube, desktop sharing, and Google Docs live editing work with XMPP? Or else they're evil?

[adrinavarro]

I don't care too much about video chat, YouTube, etc, etc… Just about the plain old XMPP/Jabber user-to-user that was the base for Google Talk and that has been around for many years. The ability to talk with users from different providers.

That is being open. Without XMPP federation, we're effectively locked into Google. And it's just a matter of time that they drop XMPP altogether and we have to use their own protocol for chatting.

[kyrias]

Considering that they only enabled federation again a little while ago it's not like that's something new.

[lucid00]

They enabled federation months after Google Talk came out actually.

[kyrias]

And then they disabled it a good while ago except for a few servers that they had whitelisted, thus my "again".

[sp332]

If they're not using XMPP, they should publish their new protocol and let other clients interface with it.

[VikingCoder]

Well it was announced yesterday, so the HN assertion seems to be that if you don't launch with XMPP, you're evil.

[woof]

Are you implying they have tried (with xmpp-extensions)?

But yes, they are evil.

[mtgx]

Well I do hope they intend to use WebRTC and WebM for Hangouts soon.

[deno]

WebRTC is a network overlay, not messaging protocol. You could use XMPP w/ WebRTC just as well.

[cooldeal]

The company with half the top Phds and best engineers in the world and billions in profit every quarter is unable to create an open extension to XMPP to accomplish those and fallback gracefully if it's not supported? You really believe that?

You could assemble a team of 30 random HN posters and they would be able to do that.

So, I think they could do it, if and only if they wanted to. But they didn't and they themselves said it was because they didn't want to be open.

[MostAwesomeDude]

I think that you should assemble your team of thirty random people on HN and get them to do that thing that you want them to do. Good luck!

[jessaustin]

The hypothesized "video chat" protocol extension to XMPP already exists and it's called Jingle. FOSS client support isn't great, but it is progressing. So if this service isn't open to FOSS clients, that's more an issue of strategy than resources. (And indeed, the decision might change in future and be attributed to improved FOSS client performance.) If the service is indeed closed, however, they probably ought to update this page:

https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications

[wslh]

> I guess open standards don't work when you're the guy trying to lock in users.

That's obvious for Google too. They don't open source their search engine (or even Google Reader!). They open source a browser and an operating system to sell other stuff. For Google open source is a weapon.

[Samuel_Michon]

“They open source a browser and an operating system to sell other stuff.”

No, those were already open source before Google got involved, so Google didn’t really have a choice.

[icebraining]

Uh, no. None of them existed before Google. What did exist were two pieces of infrastructure (Webkit and the Linux kernel), and Google could've used both without open-sourcing the rest of the application, since the licenses allow it:

- Webkit is LGPL/BSD, so it can be linked to proprietary code without forcing its redistribution.

- The Linux kernel is GPL, but the license has never applied to userspace code, and everything "above" is either written by Google or non-copyleft open source code.

I think it's only reasonably for Google to contribute some after getting so much from open source projects, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the legal choice to do otherwise.

[QEDturtles]

Wait... so Android Inc didn't exist for the 2 years between its founding in 2003 and Google's acquisition in 2005?

[icebraining]

Oh, I was actually thinking of ChromeOS. But the point still stands, since they owned the copyright, and therefore they did have a choice to keep the userspace closed.

[popee]

Google's wet dream is Linux kernel under BSD license.

[metaphorm]

thats a silly thing to say. BSD licensed Unix already exists. if they wanted to build a proprietary OS on top of it (as Apple did) they would have. the fact that they already decided not to is the entire point here. Google chose GPL Licensed Linux over BSD Licensed Unix. From a technical perspective there's not a whole lot of difference. The license is the more important difference and we already know which they chose.

[Samuel_Michon]

> as Apple did

Apple didn’t build a proprietary OS on top of BSD licensed UNIX. They used the core of NEXTSTEP, which in turn used parts of several different BSD distros (though not its kernel or driver system).

[IgorPartola]

Really? Why not use a BSD kernel then? And don't say because Linux is so much more advanced: for what Google would use it for, FreeBSD would do just fine.

[raldi]

So were BSD and KHTML, and yet when Apple built OS X and iOS and Safari on top of them, they did it closed-source.

[mtgx]

Microsoft actually did not want to open the .doc format. I believe they were forced to do it.

[siamore]

Who forced them? I can't find it on wikipedia, in a google search or microsoft's site all I found was

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Pr...

I even checked the references, the MS page adds nothing to wikipedia's info in this matter

http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/o...

[Joeri]

This was a result of the antitrust case sun and novell brought before the EU comission. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...

It got us windows without media player (which nobody used), the browser ballot (which everyone endured) and a requirement that all their server protocols be documented sufficiently for competitors to implement the same service (which we all benefited from to a large degree). http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-04-70_en.htm?local...

[siamore]

But they were only required to incorporate support for ODF in office[1], and it seems like they have complied[2]. is there any relationship between ODF and DOC?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/05/22/us-eu-microsoft-id...

[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsof...

[lloeki]

The EU pressured Microsoft into documenting various parts relevant for interoperability. One of them is the whole stack revolving around AD, which resulted in Samba 4. I don't know if this includes Office formats.

[capo]

GTalk is still as is.

As for YouTube it is and always have been available on the web for windows phone.

Microsoft in clear violation of Google's TOS used undocumented APIs and stripped ads from YouTube and now they have the audacity to say that they would have complied by the TOS if it suited them better.

Please take your anti-Google (probably Microsoft sponsored astroturf) elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=recoiledsnake

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=recoiledsnake

These submission are a honeypot for your sort.

[iamshs]

Except, Microsoft did not strip ads from the videos. They said yesterday that they will be happy to serve ads if Google lets them access. And please, let the legal departments decide if it is a clear violation or not. Do not take a decision on your own.

I think you are the one who is astro-turfing here, if i apply the finger pointing criteria to you too. It is better if you reply to the argument leaving your personal preferences neatly tucked in.

[bjustin]

Microsoft is flagrantly violating YouTube's terms of service. Saying they would serve ads if YouTube had an API for it is like me using your obviously not public WiFi and saying I would pay for it if you let me.

[cooldeal]

Comparison fail.

What Google's been saying from 3 years while dragging it's feet is that Windows Phone does not have enough users to make an app for, but now their claim is that so many people are using the Microsoft Youtube App for Windows Phone that it's hurting the content creators. Huh? Why can't they monetize them by making an app and show twice as many ads in it just to spite WP users? No, they won't. They want to disadvantage Windows Phone compared to Android. Vimeo has had a Windows Phone app from a long time, and Google' can't afford to make one? And you believe them?

Why don't they come out with the real reason then, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Skype, do about closing down things and eat up the bad press? Why beat around the bush and play delay tactics and hide behind facts? Oh, they want to protect their clean image of being "open" and "do no evil". This is a ploy by Microsoft to force Google to tell the public exactly why they refuse to make a Youtube app and even ban Microsoft from doing so.

How can Windows Phone have so few users that use YouTube that it's not worth monetizing and have so many users that use Microsoft's new app that it's hurting Google and content creator revenue? Why not agree to allow MS to show Google ads and make money since they don't have to spend the money to create the app but can take the profits?

[pi18n]

1. Google is not obliged to create an app for any platform. Regardless of user count. WTF.

2. Microsoft is obliged to follow the ToS on websites they are pulling data from. Regardless of user count.

I'd love to see Google forced to admit what they are doing also, though.

[capo]

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/09/microsoft-youtube-app-rule-b...

They built an unauthorized app and now they are complaining that the app is unauthorized.

[Dylan16807]

HTTP baby!

Trying to enforce a client side rule of 'no downloading' when every web browser in the world can download should be disregarded and mocked heartily.

[iamshs]

I am happy that the customers are getting access to the most widely used video site. I will let the companies dunk it out as to what is unauthorized or what is not. MS responded to it already, and said they are will be happy to work towards betterment of mutual customers on a day where Larry page loathed negativity among companies. Or something to that effect.

[pi18n]

They're abusing the patent system to extort money from Android device manufacturers and they have to gall to completely ignore requirements in a ToS.

I'm looking forward to the day when Microsoft is completely irrelevant. They should just shut down everything except for the research and Xbox departments now.

[iamshs]

Ok love, they will listen to you and shut everything down. What else will make you happy? Motorola actually proving useful to Google?

[untog]

You know, saying that anyone who disagrees with your opinion is "probably Microsoft sponsored astroturf" just makes me picture you with a tin foil hat on your head.

Sometimes the truth is a lot simpler than you're thinking it is. You write a lot of posts that are pro-Google. Are you sponsored by Google?!?!?

[andyl]

'Are you sponsored by Google?' I think so. I've been accused of being an 'anti-google astroturfer' before. 'Gosh that's odd', I thought. Then I read the posts written by my accuser. Pro-google, down the line - echoing PR talking points. Normal people don't do this. I do think Google hires PR flacks to post here on HN.

[untog]

That just makes you sound as bad as capo.

We live in a world where weird fanboys exist for just about anything, including Google and Microsoft.

[pessimizer]

Absolutely true, but we also live in a world in which people are paid to do this.

[jgeorge]

"hires"? No.

Fanboys work for free.

(From all directions, not just pro-google.)

[dandelany]

Seems more likely he is just a regular Google employee who supports what they are doing, albeit a bit aggressively. There are many of them on HN. Not sure why either of you are assuming malice here.

[threeseed]

How about attacking the argument instead of the person ?

Trying to paint this black/white picture of someone just because they disagree with you is frankly pathetic.

[capo]

I think I've attacked both.

[donalmacc]

Eh... https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=capo Something about the pot calling the kettle black? You don't work for google by any chance do you?

[capo]

Nope. You just joined to ask me that?

[recoiledsnake]

And I don't work for Microsoft, never worked for them or any affiliates nor own their stock or ever owned it and the closest that I know I was ever to any MS employee was when I was interviewing in Seattle at Amazon for a C++/Linux position.

Now, can we get on with the discussion instead of trying to derail it by ad hominem attacks?

[capo]

There is no "discussion" going on, you are just repeating fact-free Microsoft press statements.

If you're not getting paid you should be.

[CloudNine]

Can we comment on the stories and not the commenters themselves? What is this? A witch hunt?

[capo]

You don't think it's relevant? Microsoft is paying millions to run anti-Google attack ads and smear campaigns everywhere, it's not unthinkable that they would hire astroturf to roam sites like HN, so for the sake of the health of this community they ought to be pointed out.

[threeseed]

Do you have some proof that this person works for Microsoft ?

Because if you don't then YOU are the one degrading the quality of HN with baseless allegations.

[jlgreco]

Working for Microsoft, or working at Microsoft.

Whether or not he is being paid and regardless of who their employer may be, it seems pretty clear they are working for Microsoft.

[iamshs]

Just because you are paranoid, does not give you the right to label anyone as paid for roaming a site and attacking your favourite company. This feels like the "either you are with us or them" mentality". Please, if you do not have the proof, do not go down this path. It is dangerous, and lets anyone label anyone as being a shill and paid commentator.

[pseut]

There's up and down voting for that, and probably HN's spam filtering matters too. Making comments expressly meant to derail the conversation isn't necessary or useful.

[CloudNine]

No, it is not really that relevant.

If Microsoft is paying recoiledsnake a billion dollars to make that post, does it change any of the facts in it? No? Then why whinge about possible or probably astroturfing instead of just addressing the facts in their post?

Unless you want HN to do a full background check on every poster here, it's hard to identify Google/Apple/Microsoft fans/haters/employees/shareholders. You have the option to remain silent, vote and move on if you're not interested in a post.

[capo]

I've addressed the "facts".

[NicoJuicy]

capo actually has a point :)