Actually Electrum does use the Stratum protocol, so it's not dead at all
There are a few users on this forum who are running Electrum servers already.
The client discovers them at startup, and the great thing is that those servers
are unable to do much evil - your private keys stay on the client computer at all
times and there is no way for the servers to somehow "grab" them.
If you want to run your own server (the code is fully open-sourced, indeed)
this
How-to document should greatly help you get started. However, be aware it's not
newbie material.