The XMPP Blog

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. [Read More]

At the XMPP Summit on Monday we held a rare in-person meeting of the XMPP Council, since we had four of the five Council members in attendance. Among other things the Council issued a Last Call for comments on XEP-0174: Link-Local Messaging. This technology, which enables real-time messaging in the absence of a server, was pioneered by Apple in an early version of their iChat client. It has since been adopted in several open-source instant messaging clients and is now also widely used in the One Laptop Per Child project. [Read More]

Yesterday the IETF announced that draft-saintandre-xmpp-urn has been approved by the IESG for publication as an informational RFC. What this means for us is that the XSF (specifically the XMPP Registrar) will control its own “tree” of Uniform Resource Names to issue for use in XMPP Extension Protocols, as specified in Section 4 of XEP-0053. This is good because URNs are more stable than the URIs (such as “http://jabber.org/protocol/muc") that we’ve been using for XML namespaces in our protocols. [Read More]

Over the weekend, members of the XMPP Standards Foundation and the Jabber developer community participated in FOSDEM 2007 (one of the world’s premier conferences for developers of free and open-source software) and also held a smaller “XMPP Summit” to discuss high-priority issues related to our technology. I think it’s safe to say that the weekend was a smashing success. Our developer room at FOSDEM hosted a full schedule of talks and was often standing room only. [Read More]

Because the XSF is a standards development organization, we strive to honor standards developed by other organizations. To that end, we recently updated the web pages at www.xmpp.org (including our specification series) to comply with XHTML 1.0.

If you find a page with an “xhtml 1.0 compliant” link at the bottom but the page does not validate, please report the error to webmaster at xmpp.org.

In preparing an application for the XSF to officially achieve tax-exempt status with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, we discovered today that the original certificate of incorporation defined the organization as a “business league” under Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code, rather than as an “educational, charitable and scientific organization” under Section 501(c)(3). The reasons for the original choice of purpose are lost in the mists of time, but in any case are not consistent with the focus of the organization over the last five years on standards development. [Read More]

We sometimes receive questions about whether there are restrictions on who may submit and comment on proposals to extend XMPP, join the various XMPP-related discussion venues, or participate in events such as our upcoming DevCon. The short answer is: No. The long answer is that we strive to be a completely open and transparent community. Unlike some standards development organizations that call themselves open but are in fact industry consortia with closed processes and high barriers to entry, the XMPP Standards Foundation is fully committed to openness. [Read More]

Two months ago we launched the XMPP Intermediate Certification Authority at xmpp.net. It was a bit of an unusual step for a standards development organization to take – after all, you don’t see the IETF, W3C, and IMC offering free digital certificates to hostmasters, webmasters, and postmasters. But we decided that we needed provide some practical leadership regarding the security of the Jabber/XMPP network, and StartCom (our root CA) has made that task much easier than we could have hoped. [Read More]

FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers’ Europe Meeting, is an annual two-day conference held in Brussels, Belgium. This year the event will take place on 24 and 25 February. It is a large event with 22 main track talks, 25 lightning talks, 20 booths, and 14 developers’ rooms. Developers’ rooms are centered around a particular project or interest group and can be used for giving presentations and tutorials, discussion, etc. [Read More]

Today we issued a Last Call regarding XEP-0178: Best Practices for Use of SASL EXTERNAL. This specification is part of our continuing effort to advance the XMPP RFCs to Draft Standard within the IETF. Although XEP-0178 does not contain any proposed changes to RFC 3920 for inclusion in rfc3920bis, it does document best practices regarding a particular SASL authentication mechanism, in particular the SASL EXTERNAL mechanism as it relates to the X. [Read More]