[MLUG] October 15th - The Day Microsoft screws us over....again!!!!

[Mark Grenham]

Ok, I don't know how many people are aware of this but from the 15th of October Microsoft are removing compatability on thier servers for versions of the MSN Protocol below version 8.
this will mean that the likes of GAIM and other 3rd party Instant Messenging clients supporting the MSN protocol will no longer be able to connect to the MSN service.
Here some information about it on the GAIM website http://gaim.sourceforge.net/msn.php

       It seems that Micosoft is trying to prevent Linux users from accessing the MSN Messenger Service with the clients we prefer. So as it says on the GAIM Page mentioned above.
we should use something else and get our contacts to migrate to something else like the open source Jabber.

    Jabber was recently menitoned on the Cork iLUG Mailing Archive(http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/cork/2003-August/003510.html) and it seems that someone has set up a Jabber Server in Ireland(jabber.beecher.net). 
I was thinking that maybe we should try set up a Jabber server on say Linux.ie and offer Download for clients supporting Jabber IM such as GAIM, and even add a link to the GAIM for windows binarys.
 This would encourage people to migrate to Jabber especially when MSN are doing what they are doing. The added bonus of switching to Jabber is its completely open source and thats always a good thing. There is also a PHP Driven Jabber Client
which bould be put on the linux.ie site and it can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/webmessenger/.

    I think it would be a great idea to do something like this and encourage people to migrate to the opensource alternative.If anyone with "power" is reading this and thinks it would be worth doing could
they please let us know if there will be anything done about this.

Kind Regards,

Mark


GAIM Windows Binary Download: http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gaim/gaim-0.67.exe