Over the past few weeks for various reasons I have been asked to communicate with people using Skype, the popular program for making calls over the Internet. The chats I have been asked on though are just text chats. I'm slightly wary of Skype after reading a thought provoking entry on the Ubuntu Wiki about the ethics of using the service and because I can't get a version that will work on a 64bit operating system. As it is not interoperable, there is a big risk of lock in, once all of your contacts are on Skype surely you will have to go on Skype too. It seems very backward to me to have such lock in, imagine if you had a mobile phone and you could only call people on the same network, it would be a ridiculous situation. The only interface out of Skype appears to be to the PSTN not to other chat clients.

Today though I needed a chatroom where three of use could have a discussion without having to leave our desks or make special arrangements. Not wanting to go the Skype route that was initially suggested, I found out that the Jabber protocol, which powers the MSG service run by KMi, supports chat rooms and this seemed like the perfect arrangement. I got in contact with Alex Little over there who documented in his blog how we used Pidgin, a popular open source instant messaging client (which works on Windows as well as Linux) to set up a "meeting room" and shortly after that we could all get together and have our discussion. The whole system worked really well, the only real problem was that the invite system did not seem to work. It looks like Kopete, admittedly my favourite IM client, can also support chat rooms, just right click over the icon for the Jabber-powered service in the bottom right of the Kopete window and select "Join Groupchat".

It was all fairly straight forward to get up and running and I'm glad we could meet this need with an open source client, open source server and an open protocol. There is an argument that none of this matters, that proprietary technology works for most people, so why bother with open technologies? The answer is very simple, it isn't "most people" you are trying to communicate with, but specific people, and if those people are excluded from using a piece of communications software because of the platform they use, then it is you who becomes inconvenienced. Staying with open protocols can avoid these problems and allow all of us to communicate freely.