My Two Cents on AOL's Blockings

Every time an article gets posted on Slashdot about the AIM service that AOL provides, I see the same comments being made over and over again. A sizable percentage of those comments tend to be misinformed, or sometimes just wrong. So here's my own thoughts and commentary on everything AOL has done with the AIM service since the announcement of TOC.

AOL Announces TOC

In 1998 AOL announced that it was going to be providing an open protocol that clients could use to access the AIM service; this protocol became known as TOC. They not only released a specification of the protocol, they also released a client that used the protocol - and released it under the GPL. TiK (as it was called) was written in tcl/Tk, and though it wasn't a 1.0 release, it supported nearly every feature the TOC protocol offered.

AOL gave the Open Source community TOC, and most people seemed to think at the time that this was a Really Good Thing, and that AOL was really trying to be friends with us. AOL giving us TOC negates any argument about us not having any right to use their servers. TOC operates as a proxy to the real service - it's actually less efficient to use TOC than it is to use Oscar. Before you can claim that all of these unofficial clients are a drain on AOL's resources, TOC must be dropped. Unless if they drop TOC, we have a right to use those resources.

Since the release of TOC, it has not kept up with Oscar, and in fact has lost features since its release. When TOC was announced, it could not retrieve users' away messages or request RVOUS actions (RVOUS actions include file transfers, buddy icons, direct IM, and voice chat). Since its release, it has lost the ability to search for users, and features that Oscar has gained have never been added to TOC. So while TOC can still perform all of the basic functionality that users need, it is not a valid alternative to Oscar.

AOL Blocks MSN and Odigo

Although these two events were separate they are related. Both were competing IM systems. Please note the distinct difference between an IM system and and IM client: clients connect to a system. AOL has never deliberately blocked any client, even an unofficial one, from connecting to their service (though they have made modifications that occasionally broke unofficial clients). They have only blocked competing systems, such as MSN and Odigo, from being able to communicate with AIM users.

Because MSN and Odigo both have closed servers and closed clients, I don't think these blocks were ever really looked at one way or the other by most people; or at least, they should not have been. If MSN had "won" the battle, so to speak, it would have been replacing one evil, AOL, for another, Microsoft (the only reason I say "evil" is that their servers are not open source).

AOL and Time/Warner Merge

Everyone seems to think that because AOL and Time/Warner merged that AOL has to open up their AIM service; the FCC said so, after all. This has been greatly misread by nearly everyone except AOL. According to the FCC conditions, AOL only needs to open AIM to at least one would-be competitor if they add "advanced, IM-based high speed services", specifically, video conferencing. Until they add video conferencing, they are allowed to keep it as closed as they want.

AOL Blocks Jabber (and Gaim)

Once again, AOL did not deliberately block Gaim (a client); it was a by-product of blocking Jabber (a system). What's really infuriating about this, though, is that Jabber is working towards openness and interoperability, and AOL doesn't want any part of it. Blocks by AOL have never been about resources or making sure only valid clients connect; they have always been about cutting out competitors' strongest link: the ability to talk to AIM/AOL users. Without that ability, it is highly unlikely that a competing IM system could survive (unless if you're Microsoft, in which case you just put MSN Messenger on everyone's desktop).

In any event, Jabber was blocked. It's currently able to connect, and the last release of Gaim (0.11.0pre10) is able to use Oscar without any problems. If a different checksum is asked for, we will be setting up a checksum server that will provide the correct 16 bytes, so people will still be able to use Gaim. This seems like the only reasonable solution for Gaim. Jabber's current solution is to require a copy of the AIM binary at each server installation, which is more reasonable since they are a server and not a client. However, since it has been more than two weeks since the checksum value changed, I doubt that a checksum server will be required. AOL had attempted to block Jabber based on other parts of Oscar besides the checksum, so I think the worst of it is over.

Conclusion

So that's it. I wrote this just to get a couple points in, in case any discussion about AIM ever happens again. Just to sum up, they were:

--EWarmenhoven, April 19, 2001