The XMPP Blog

The XMPP Standards Foundation will once again be participating in the Google Summer of Code for 2007. What is a standards organization doing in the Summer of Code? Well, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) emerged from the Jabber open-source community and we still have many active open-source projects. Plus as previously mentioned our community is a cohesive blend of open standards, commercial organizations, and open-source developers.  [Read More]

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.  [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. Although we lose the ability to copy and paste such a URI into a browser and find information about the relevant protocol, it’s easy enough to search for a string like “urn:xmpp:chatneg” and find the relevant specification. So the slight loss in convenience is offset by the improved permanence of our XML namespaces. Besides, all the other standards development organizations are using URNs, so why not us? :-)  [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. Topics included virtual presence, Jingle, telephony integration, mobile applications, server and client architecture, transporting XMPP over HTTP connections, and hacking XMPP applications with the Twisted Python library. I also gave a talk in the main track on secure communications (video footage is here), in which I discussed our recent security work and announced our partnership with NLnet to make end-to-end encryption a reality on our network.  [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.  [Read More]

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. Therefore this seems like a good time to clarify the purposes of the XSF through an official amendment to the certificate of incorporation. The initial version of a proposal to do just that is located here and may be voted on by the XSF membership in the next few weeks (once it has been discussed and improved on the publicly-archived discussion list for XSF members).  [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. Although we have elected members and generous sponsors, they merely provide the legal and financial basis for us to pursue our work.  [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., resulting in an additional 146 slots in 2006. While there is no entrance fee, FOSDEM is funded by the generous donations of its 2000+ visitors and several sponsors.  [Read More]