The GPL ensures that you and others retain the freedom to modify and distribute the Gale source code. Gale will never lock into any one vendor's proprietary, closed system. Gale is useful. Advanced categorization and filtering features mean that you can precisely control your level of participation and distraction . We've been at this for years, we've tried everything else out there, and we have a lot of experience with the usability of real-time messaging systems.
Gale is secure.
Most other systems depend on the security of a central bank of servers, and provide no protection against network eavesdroppers. Gale uses strong cryptography for both privacy and authentication , and is designed to work in an environment of mutual distrust between users and administrators. Gale's architecture uses a loosely-connected set of servers which locate each other via DNS only when they need to talk to each other. Multicast is accomplished by the dynamic creation of self-healing spanning trees of interconnected servers. This means Gale is fast and stable.