Analysts believe Microsoft and Yahoo don't want third-party clients on their networks because they use their own clients to deliver advertisements and direct users to other services. "Both Microsoft and Yahoo value the control over the clients and the last thing they want is for their users to be using third-party clients on their networks," said Michael Gartenberg, a research director with Jupiter Research.
(Yes, they have a Linux client; but I'm not going to download it and give Yahoo my bandwidth to blast ads at me. Bugger that for a game of soldiers. If you want to reach me, use Jabber; my ICQ or AIM accounts will still work, at least until AOLTW lock those down.)
I think it's a British phrase, but it's very popular in Australia, too. There's many variants on what the game is (i.e. not just a "game of soldiers"), although I can't think of one at the moment. Basically means "it's not worth the effort".
There's a new MSN-t transport for Jabber available that uses protocol 8 and should work fine: http://msn-transport.jabberstudio.org/
I expect most people running Jabber servers will upgrade soon.
Unfortunately, I can't find any information on development for a new version of yahoo-transport-2.
Cerulean have announced a patch for Trillian, a windows uber-chat system that lets you log into MSN Yahoo AIM and IRC (?!) at the same time, that will allow people to stay with the networks. www.trillian.cc
buh ... http://www.trillian.cc/
Yes, Trillian's good for those stuck in Windows-world. Though one key deficiency in it is that it doesn't support Jabber. But that's OK, as nobody but a bunch of geeks uses that anyway.
That's probably why MSN and Yahoo have been yelling at me to install a "security update" for a while. Ah well, if Yahoo thinks it can stop us hackers, they're wrong.
Gaim 0.68 doesn't get the nag messages. I think they just changed the reported version number, though; not sure how it'll survive the "upgrade".
Trillian 2.0 (pay version?) has Jabber support, apparently.
"Bugger that for a game of soldiers?"