In 2003, I released my very first opensource project, JBother. A Jabber client, written in Java.

It was an awesome experience. I learned a lot of Java, Swing, and a lot about the jabber protocol itself. Other people wanted to use it, which felt pretty good, I have to say.

I used it to talk to everyone. It supported a lot of advanced jabber features, like groupchat and transport registration (which meant it supported AIM, MSN Messenger, etc). Eventually, several other programmers became interested and started contributing. UCLA started using it. It was somewhat popular, as far as jabber clients go.

Eventually, jabber seemed to go out of style, and Google Talk removed support for it, making it a lot less useful for me. I continued to support it for a few more years until all interest died off, and then I stopped working on it. Eventually I just let the domain expire.

Someone Else Has Taken Over? ¶

The other day I was looking for screenshots of it, and found that the main site, https://jbother.org was back, and looked nearly identical to the site I had abandoned. The whois info shows nameservers that I've never used before.

It's serving up a single release, JBother-0.8.9.jar, the last one I ever made. However, I have no idea if the jar file is the one I made, or something full of malware. I've downloaded the file and looked over the archive, but it's been so long I can't tell what was there originally or what might be new. The oldest timestamp in the file is 2006, which is probably about correct, but who knows if the timestamps are spoofed. If this person wanted to take over the project, why didn't they contact me?

I really have no way of verifying that it's really my release or something else.

Pretty strange!