The ending, redefined.

I often struggle to convey my ideology to other people when discussing a particular issue. Whether it be my dislike of Facebook, why I use the XMPP protocol for instant messaging, my love for Firefox or why I will never ever own an iPhone.

Luckily, I stumbled across an article written by people much cleverer than me weaving together Green politics, Linux and Firefox.

Like a liberal free trade idealist, I believe that society progresses best when there is more freedom and creativity. We are at a loss in the capitalist utopia of patent protected ideas owned by monopolistic trans-national corporations. Equally, we are at a loss when we have an overpowering state with no opportunity to innovate and provide alternatives, as favoured my some socialists.

We need an open playing field where each player can join in, bringing their unique talents, but with a referee to ensure every one is playing by the rules. This, I believe, is not blue or red, but green. If someone starts their own game and won’t let everyone else join, then we should ignore them, even if they do have a nice new shiny ball!

My MSN Messenger account has not been working for some time, so I decided to delete it. You can now chat to me via an XMPP compatible instant messaging client. XMPP is an open standard to allow people to chat. Instead of having people chat within Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/ICQ/Skype ghettos, with XMPP you can talk to anyone. You can get an XMPP compatible instant messaging account from Google Talk. Contact me and I’ll give you my account details.

You can use programs like Empathy, Pidgin or Trillion to ‘upgrade’ your Microsoft Messenger to do both Microsoft messaging and open XMPP messaging.