Re: jabber.gnome.org: a proposal

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Bonjour,

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 02:42:23PM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Is there some reason the Jabber server has to be connected to that LDAP
> password?
Well. If you don't, then you need to implement some form of 
registration and authentication.
One could do in-band registration but restricting that to, say, only 
people having a GNOME Foundation membership requires you to have that 
data somehow. Potentially in LDAP.
Leaving in-band registration open for everyone makes maintaining that 
service an even bigger burden. For close to no benefit as there are 
several open Jabber servers out there.

Not having in-band registration means that you have to somehow come up 
with a registration form, most likely web as you wouldn't want to code 
and maintain some self written module in an obscure language that 
all the jabber servers are implemented in. It's all possible, but 
someone needs to do it. And more importantly: Maintain it.

I'm all for self hosted services. I don't like to be dependent on third 
parties that may have interests that do not play well together with 
mine. In the case of a GNOME jabber server though, I assume minimal 
benefits with high costs. The potential benefits raised in the thread 
did not convince me. The distributed nature of XMPP makes it hard to 
justify running your own instance if you don't heavily depend on it.

Cheers,
  Tobi