JiveSoftware has become one of my favorite open source companies this year, having discovered their great collaboration offerings*. We have deployed their openfire XMPP server here at work (convincing people that it's better than using YM or IP Message is another thing, :p ).
The reason I'm blogging about them now is that I just found out about their free licenses: Jive is offering free licenses (unlimited I assume) for OpenSource developers and user groups for their Clearspace X and Jive Forums products.
So if you're working on an open source project and you're thinking of building a community around your project, you may want to take a look at what Jive's offering.
*also, I really dig their kickass web site design.
YM sucks! I don't use the YM app, anymore -- I use Meebo instead, which is being seriously buffed up recently. =D
ReplyDeleteAs for IPMsg, I only learned about it in my new job, and it's quite hard to say whether it's any good. I like how easy it is to have LAN messaging and that you can even pass around files (passing files are so-so, but passing an entire folder surprised me!). However, I didn't like how its primitive interface and logging.
As for Jive's stuff, I think I already mentioned that I set-up Wildfire back in our Calamba office. It was very easy to set-up, and the basic IM features that I look for (offline messages, group chat, file transfer and, yeah, emoticons =p) are readily available over our LAN!
Meebo. :) I don't why, but I'm really finding it hard to include it in my system. Maybe I can still taste the bitter first taste I had when I first used it during its early days.
ReplyDeleteOn IPMessage, actually i'm torn. IP Message's decentralized nature can also be a good thing, but I agree with you, the UI is really a big turn off. More on the decentralized concept, I think extending Spark to support bonjour/zeronconf is a good idea. I think I'm listing that under my someday-maybe list.
About IPMessage's file transfer: I haven't really looked deep into the technical details, but I have encountered times when IPMessage's file transfer is a lot slower than Openfire's (on the same network). Same here btw about the folder transfer. hehe.