What is the Work of Dogs in this Country? by Joel Spolsky discusses the so-called New Economy and the jargon phrase eating one's own dog food, which means to actually use the software one writes. To relate it to another jargon phrase, in open source and free software, one scratches one's own itch--it's a given that one is eating one's own dog food, because there's no other reason to write the software than to use it!
This is what got on my nerves so much about JabberBeans, the Jabber library I used in Jackal: David Waite, author of JabberBeans, isn't actually writing a client that uses the library. This meant that when I started writing a client, I found some outstanding bugs in the library that were just sitting there, because no one had yet written a client that had that problem with the code. Also, there were some annoying architectural issues that several other client authors and I saw that apparently dwaite didn't, since he wasn't writing a client with it.
So rather than being able to write my client using JabberBeans as the library it was intended to be, I would have to help out with JabberBeans' development first. I couldn't do the fun parts of Jackal--the module API and modules that do things no other Jabber client I know of actually does yet--because JabberBeans is the shifting sand I would be building Jackal on top of. I have to dig and build below where my building actually goes if I don't want Jackal to fall over.
This is more of a rant than I meant, but it's something I've been trying to say for a while now.
