By: gnafuthegreat
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439406">Flatland_Spider</a>.
My understanding is that it's mostly packaging up Prosody with helpful defaults/plugins and a web frontend for account management. In that way, I think it shares a lot of similarities with a Linux distribution that takes upstream projects and packages them up in a helpful way. To me, "rebrand" would be similar to a fork with minimal changes beyond the name. With all that said, this is just my own mental model and does not necessarily reflect how the Prosody/Snikket folks would want to be categorized :-).
Do we want "distribution" to be used more widely to refer to software other than Linux-based operating systems? Does that dilute the meaning of the word too much given what it's come to be associated with? Fun stuff.
By: Flatland_Spider
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439406">Flatland_Spider</a>.
gnafuthegreat,
"Distribution" could work. "Rebrand"?
I'm not sure how much the Snikket service diverges from Prosody.
By: gnafuthegreat
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439406">Flatland_Spider</a>.
One word that comes to mind is "distribution". If you'll forgive me for borrowing the term, could something like the Snikket server be called a distribution of Prosody?
By: Flatland_Spider
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439389">MattJ</a>.
I couldn't think of a better term then fork.
A prompt for the tech philosophers out there: What is a rebranded version of something else in software development jargon?
The service and client developed in lockstep is kind of the appeal of Snikket. Unless, that has changed, I thought that was one of the goals of the project.
By: Drunkula
Sounds intriguing...
By: MattJ
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439379">Flatland_Spider</a>.
"Fork" might be the wrong term in this case - as the same developers work on both Prosody and Snikket, and both projects are closely related and developed together, for different audiences.
Prosody is roughly as flexible as a box of Lego bricks. Snikket is that box of bricks ready-assembled into a easy-to-use personal messaging service (plus the apps), so that you don't have to learn the nitty-gritty details of XMPP.
By: Flatland_Spider
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439337">j0scher</a>.
It's also a fork of the Prosody XMPP service. The app and service are developed together to make sure there is consistent support for XMPP extensions on both ends.
>>> I'm not associated with the Snikket project. I've been following it for a while though. <<<
By: MattJ
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/#comment-10439337">j0scher</a>.
That's the goal. After seeing people search for "Conversations" in the iOS app store, and also people looking for an app called "XMPP", it's not hard to realize that branding and consistency are important to help make such a diverse ecosystem more easily approachable. We currently have Android and iOS apps, and are working on the foundations for desktop and web via a cross-platform SDK we're building.
By: j0scher
Is Snikket the first truly cross-platform XMPP app?