What part of it? Lots of commercial services are built on open protocols. HTTP is probably the most prominent example, but even in the IM world it is (was?) not that odd to see a commercial service use IRC under the hood.
> Google Talk's usage of XMPP was more of an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish than _actual_ adoption.
That would have been an actual strategy, and probably would have worked, but from what I could tell they just sort of fumbled around without really committing.
As I recall, the Embrace was half-hearted, the implementation was pretty standard with no Extensions, and they never really got around to an Extinguish phase, they eventually just phased out support for XMPP clients at all.
The only way I think Google's incoherence of multiple overlapping stabs at messaging over many years makes sense is as internal maneuvering and jockeying for position among execs playing chess with the various engineering teams and end users as pawns.
They extinguished their own service by killing Google Talk and replacing it with Hangouts. They never dropped XMPP from Talk, they just never implemented it in Hangouts. Talk and Wave really started Google's churn of messaging apps, which has seemed to just hurt themselves.
> They never dropped XMPP from Talk, they just never implemented it in Hangouts.
ISTR that they did back off of XMPP support in Google Talk to some extent a bit before that last move. Something about not allowing incoming connection requests from non-Google accounts by default IIRC.
There were a few months more than 10 years ago when you could use one XMPP client for all your various social/chat accounts. I want to say around 2008 ?
In the continuation of this. Open source gets a lot of credit, but it deserves even more - companies, governments, institutions need to acknowledge it. Open source is jet fuel for the IT/technology industries, the ultimate commoditization of portable software.
This is rather unusual for a commercial service