AIM Protocol

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:51:16 -0500, Luke Schierer wrote
> Mark Doliner wrote:
> > On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 14:37:40 -0500, Etan Reisner wrote
> >> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 02:32:48PM -0500, Justin Rodriguez wrote:
> >>> Hey,
> >>>     I don't know if its of any use to anybody, but I just wanted to mention
> >>> that AOL released a copy of the OSCAR Protocol used in aim. You can find it
> >>> at http://dev.aol.com/aim/oscar/
> >>> - Justin
> >> Those documents are under the rather unfortunate Open AIM license 
> >> and are thus more-or-less unusable. At least given my reading of things.
> > 
> > We should probably talk about this, since their protocol documentation could
> > potentially be useful to us.  The referenced documentation is listed as being
> > released under the requirements of these two documents:
> > 
> > http://dev.aol.com/aim/license
> > http://dev.aol.com/aim/terms
> > 
> > I'm not a lawyer, but I've read through both of those and I don't see anything
> > that would be problematic.  A large part of the requirements apply to the
> > following four things:
> > 
> > 1. Presence Tools
> > 2. Plugin Tools
> > 3. Custom Client Tools
> > 4. Web AIM Tools
> > 
> > These all have special meaning with the AIM license.  More importantly
> > Pidgin/libpurple/Finch do not fall under any of these categories, which means
> > the requirements don't apply to us. (The requirements are things like, "show
> > buddy info," "show buddy icons," "if you have over 100,000 concurrent users
> > then use our ads.")
> > 
> > Another large chunk of requirements applies only to the developer and not to
> > the products he creates.  The requirements are reasonable things like, "don't
> > break the law," "don't abuse your api key," "don't claim that your product is
> > created or endorsed by AOL."
> > 
> > The only requirements that seem borderline questionable to me are those in
> > section V. D. 2: "Restrictions on Functionality of Developer Applications." 
> > These are things like, "don't send SPIM," "don't abuse our servers," "don't
> > distribute viruses."
> > 
> > I think it is reasonable for any developer who wishes to read their oscar
> > protocol documentation to adhere to these requirements.
> > 
> > -Mark
> 
> I think we should have the lawyers that helped us with IMFreedom 
> look things over and give us a lawyerly opinion.

I would very much appreciate that, if they are willing to do it for us.

-Mark