I’ve seen it happen time and again. Companies and individuals go out of their way to write great open source software, then, when the moment comes to let the world know about it, they (and/or their early adopters and proponents) present it as “an alternative to [proprietary solution] Foo”.

That’s bad when Foo is an established player:

• Firefox, the alternative to Internet Explorer

I have released a developer preview of xmpp4moz.

A friend who followed its progress closely, said that he is “dreaming of IM2.0 every day”. That made me think.