<story><title>Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort. You can&apos;t just take Google services engineered for Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it&apos;s not a matter of just code dumping.&lt;p&gt;Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android, iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with spec document is probably the least priority.</text></item><item><author>mindcrime</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn&apos;t prevent the company from making it public and interoperable.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Indeed.  If basic XMPP wasn&apos;t good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or whatever other protocol already exists) then the &quot;right thing to do&quot; would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was.  OR, as a secondary option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol, along with an open source reference implementation.&lt;p&gt;Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RyanZAG</author><text>If the reason they can&apos;t document is because they have a small team, then this is an easy solution for Google - hire some people to document the system. They don&apos;t even have to be in direct contact with the actual development team, just access to the source code and developer design documents should be enough. For a company the size of Google with the amount of profits they make, &apos;small team&apos; is just not an excuse for anything.&lt;p&gt;The move is definitely deliberate, they can&apos;t have Skype come in and allow people with Skype to make calls to hangout  when the hangout client can&apos;t make calls into Skype. It would make them look bad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort. You can&apos;t just take Google services engineered for Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it&apos;s not a matter of just code dumping.&lt;p&gt;Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android, iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with spec document is probably the least priority.</text></item><item><author>mindcrime</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn&apos;t prevent the company from making it public and interoperable.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Indeed.  If basic XMPP wasn&apos;t good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or whatever other protocol already exists) then the &quot;right thing to do&quot; would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was.  OR, as a secondary option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol, along with an open source reference implementation.&lt;p&gt;Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text>True, but I still think they should commit to doing it eventually.  Even if they just came out today and said &quot;We&apos;ll have an OSS reference implementation and detailed spec available within 6 months&quot; I think most people would be OK with that (as long as they followed through).&lt;p&gt;But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is &lt;i&gt;not cool&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>