Miscellaneous

It’s well-known that XMPP technologies emerged from the open-source server project first released by Jeremie Miller in 1999, as well as the combined software/operator community that grew up around the server. In the early days, “Jabber” meant many things: Jer’s server, the protocol used between clients and servers, the server network, the community in general, even a company called Jabber.com (then Jabber Inc., purchased by Cisco Systems in late 2008). Over time we have worked to disambiguate the terms. Thus Jer’s server was renamed jabberd and the protocol was renamed XMPP. [Read More]

Reported by Peter Saint-Andre Back in March, we decided to hold an informal “Monthly XMPP Meeting” among developers in our community. Here is a brief report on the second such meeting, held today (April 14) in the jdev@conference.jabber.org chatroom (the archived discussion log is here). Here are some of the topics we discussed… Last Call for XEP-0232: Software Information The points raised included: Is this a misuse of service discovery? Will this make entity capability caches less useful because they will be too large to search easily? Does it make more sense to publish this information via the Personal Eventing Protocol using the old software version format? The XMPP Council will vote on XEP-0232 at its next meeting (April 22). More feedback is welcome before then on the standards@xmpp.org mailing list. [Read More]

Simon Tennant, CEO of Buddycloud, gave a talk at FOSDEM 2009 on Geolocation with XMPP. Buddycloud is an application for your mobile phone that lets your friends know what you are doing and where you are. You can find out more about Buddycloud here. [caption id=“attachment_334” align=“aligncenter” width=“422” caption=“Simon Tennant @ FOSDEM 2009”][/caption] Simon’s presentation is available in PDF format here [Read More]

The first event from the San Francisco XMPP and Jabber Technologies Meetup group took place on February 18th on “Implementing Pubsub for Web Services”, organised by Julien Genestoux of Notifixious. Information on the meetup together with videos are available from: http://technology.meetup.com/11/calendar/9322074/ We’ll publish news of further meetings of this group as and when we receive them. [Read More]

In its meeting today, the XSF’s Board of Directors approved the privacy policy for xmpp.org and jabber.org, including the jabber.org IM service. Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the draft policy. [Read More]

Among other things, the XSF runs the jabber.org IM service, which is one of the largest nodes on the open XMPP network (yes, we really do believe in running code!). However, we’ve never had a privacy and security policy for this service. Recently we’ve been working to define such a policy so that folks who use the service know exactly where they stand. A draft of the policy is located at https://xmpp.org/xsf/privacy.shtml and your feedback is welcome. Before the end of the year, the XSF Board of Directors will vote to approve the policy, but we are seeking input well before then so that all concerns are addressed. [Read More]

Here at the XMPP Standards Foundation, we’re not just a bunch of protocol geeks. As firm believers in the old IETF mantra of “rough consensus and running code”, we run one of the most central nodes on the XMPP network: the jabber.org IM service. A lot of care and attention goes into running this service: hardware, hosting, software, and precious time donated by a dedicated group of volunteers. All of those factors were in evidence during our just-completed migration of the service to a new machine. Special thanks are due to the following companies and individuals: [Read More]

The XMPP Standards Foundation is happy to finally recognize United States Secure Hosting Center as an in-kind sponsor of the XSF. USSHC has been hosting the XSF’s server infrastructure (and before that the jabber.org project’s machines) for as long as anyone can remember, and has unfailingly provided not only a secure location for our infrastructure but also extremely reliable service. After many years of laboring in obscurity, USSHC is finally receiving due recognition for its efforts. [Read More]

Several months ago a developer in the Jabber/XMPP community let us know that the XSF’s intellectual property rights policy prevented him from including text, examples, and schemas from our XEP specifications in his code. In particular, the Creative Commons Attribution License (which we were using to cover XEPs) is not consistent with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Since we are big fans of Debian GNU/Linux around here (we use it to run all the jabber.org/xmpp.org infrastructure), we decided to investigate the matter. [Read More]

We issued a Last Call on the Jingle specifications on November 21st. So why have they not yet advanced to a status of Draft within the XSF’s standards process? There are several reasons: The end-of-year holidays intervened. We are gathering detailed feedback from a wide variety of implementors, including Google Talk, Nokia, Asterisk, and the One Laptop Per Child Project (via Collabora). We are defining a thorough mappingbetween Jingle and SIP for multimedia session negotiation, and still need to define the mapping in the direction from SIP to Jingle. We are working on some specifications that describe how to use Jingle as the method for negotiating additional session types (for example, file transfer and whiteboarding) so we can make sure that Jingle semantics are reusable for applications other than voice and video. These efforts should be finished in the next few weeks, which will enable the XMPP Council to vote on advancing the Jingle specifications during its in-person meeting at the XMPP devcon in Brussels on February 24-25. [Read More]