Miscellaneous

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.[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.[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.[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.[Read More]

FOSDEM is coming up soon (Brussels, February 23-24) and the XSF will once again hold a devcon (on February 24 and 25). The XMPP Standards Foundation would like to encourage XMPP technologists from Europe and beyond to participate, especially in the devcon. In its meeting earlier this week, the XSF Board of Directors authorized a new policy: the Foundation will pay the hotel costs of any XSF member who participates in the devcon.[Read More]

Today the XMPP Council issued a last call for comments on the various Jingle specifications for multimedia negotiation over XMPP. Comments should be provided by December 14, so read the following specifications and send your feedback to the standards@xmpp.org list: Jingle Jingle Audio via RTP Resource Application Priority Jingle ICE Transport Jingle Raw UDP Transport Jingle Video via RTP Jingle DTMF Bootstrapping Implementation of Jingle We will soon also publish a specification for mapping between SIP and Jingle for seamless gatewaying of open multimedia technologies.[Read More]

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open XML technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized XML routing. More formally, XMPP is defined by RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 as published by the IETF in October 2004. Everything we’ve built on top of those two specifications we call “XMPP extensions” (usually defined in the XEP series).[Read More]

Today we advanced XEP-0174: Link-Local Messaging to Draft in our standards process. This specification defines how to send XMPP messages in a serverless mode via zero-configuration networking (a technology created by Apple Computer, originally called Rendezvous and now called Bonjour). As previously mentioned, we issued a Last Call for comments on this specification on March 1. Feedback came in from a number of developers, resulting in some corrections late in the process, thus the delay in publication.[Read More]

As previously mentioned, we are working to update the core XMPP specifications by incorporating feedback based on the significant implementation and deployment experience with XMPP technologies we have gained since RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 were published in October, 2004. To date we have expected the revised versions to advance XMPP to a status of Draft Standard within the Internet Standards Process managed by the IETF. However, it seems that we overlooked some of the rules from RFC 2026, specifically that “standards track specifications normally must not depend on other standards track specifications which are at a lower maturity level”.[Read More]