Freedom is one of our core values in the Jabber/XMPP community. The focus on freedom goes back to Jeremie Miller, who invented the base of our technologies in 1998 as a way for people to connect over the Internet without the silos and restrictions enforced by consumer IM services.
Over the years that sense of freedom has broadened and deepened. Consider:
- Our community has centered on Internet protocols (not a given open-source codebase) in part to give developers the freedom to use whatever license they want: free source, open source, freeware, shareware, commercial, or any combination thereof.
- Our protocols are as free as the air, which means anyone may implement them without asking permission or worrying about patents.
- Our protocols are pure XML, which means developers may extend the protocols for their own custom functionality. While we standardize XMPP extensions that are of more general interest, developers have the freedom to make their own extensions and not standardize them through the XSF if they don’t want to.
- As previously mentioned, all of our discussion venues and processes are completely open and transparent, giving any individual the freedom to participate.
- Our technologies are designed to enable organizations to connect their XMPP servers for inter-domain federation if desired, but they also have the freedom to run a server behind the firewall without connecting to other domains.
- Individuals who use Jabber/XMPP technologies for instant messaging still have the fundamental freedom of conversation that Jeremie envisioned back in 1998.
So freedom is more than just a pleasant word or “value statement” for us – it is a way of life and a key part of everything we are working to achieve.
