Extended Conversation

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:

• HP donated a powerful new machine that will be dedicated to providing this service. Paul Holland, Kartik Subbarao, and Dann Frazier deserve particular recognition for their assistance.
• Jerry Pasker of United States Secure Hosting Center once again went above and beyond the call of duty regarding physical hosting and support services. Thanks also to Jer, Jason, and Seth for getting the machine installed and configured.
• The ejabberd project builds the software that we run for this service. The good folks at Process-one, especially Mickaël Rémond, provided invaluable assistance with bug fixes and real-time support.
• Our dedicated team of infrastructure volunteers put in lots of time, often at odd hours, to make this migration a reality. We could not have done it without work by Jonathan Siegle, Florian Jensen, Kevin Smith, Dave Cridland, Matthew Wild, Jack Moffitt, Alexander Gnauck, Niek Bergman, and others (you know who you are!).

Now that we have migrated the jabber.org service to a new machine, we look forward to rolling out some new features that were not possible on our old machine. Stay tuned for details…

Since July 2006, the XMPP Standards Foundation has held a biannual get-together for developers, service operators, and other technical folks who are actively working on XMPP. We’re happy to announce that the XSF will continue the tradition by holding its fifth XMPP Summit on July 21 and 22, 2008, in Portland, Oregon, USA. Thanks to generous assistance from O’Reilly Conferences, the Summit will take place the same week and in the same location as OSCON 2008.

Participation is open (and free!) to all developers, service operators, and other interested individuals. Please note that this is a hard-code technical get-together with plenty of coding sprints, hackfests, interop testing, brainstorming sessions, geeky lightning talks, etc. This meeting is not intended for marketing presentations and other fluff!

If you would like to participate, please join the summit@xmpp.org mailing list and introduce yourself.

See you in Portland!

For the fourth year in a row, the XMPP Standards Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code. Our projects for 2008 are as follows:

• Mateusz Biliński (vArDo) — Plug-in system for Gajim (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Adam Czachorowski (gislan) — Metacontacts support and various roster
  improvements for Psi (Mentor: Remko Tronçon)
• Tomas Karasek (tomk) — Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (XEP-0124) support in Gajim Jabber client (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Aleksey Palazchenko (AlekSi) — Psi: Message history (Mentor: Kevin Smith)
• Safa Sofuoğlu (huni) — Updating and Improving BOSH Support of Openfire (Mentor: Gaston Dombiak)
• Paweł Wiejacha (senu) — Themable WebKit-based Chat Dialogs (Mentor: Kevin Smith)

Here’s to another successful summer of coding!

Regrettably, the XSF has not issued an annual report since 2002. It seems we’re always too busy getting things done to report on our activities. But this year we decided to turn over a new leaf by completing an annual report, available at <http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/docs/annual-report-2007.shtml>. Feedback is welcome, as always.

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. We look forward to continuing our relationship with USSHC for many years to come!

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.

After some research as well as discussion by the XSF Board of Directors, the XSF membership, and the debian-legal mailing list, we settled on a slightly-modified MIT license to cover our specifications. (No, we didn’t want to use a modified license, but we needed to make certain rights crystal-clear to those who develop XMPP-based software and deploy XMPP-based services.) This license gives folks even more freedom to implement, deploy, copy, modify, merge, publish, translate, distribute, sublicense, even sell copies of our specifications. And since Jabber technologies have always been focused on freedom, it’s only appropriate that the XSF’s specifications should be as free as possible.

The updated license is here:

<http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ipr-policy.shtml>

Enjoy!

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 mapping between 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.

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. The XSF may ask that you share a room with another XSF member, but we will pay for up to four nights’ stay at the Atlas hotel in the center of Brussels (where we will be staying and meeting).

To take advantage of this offer, you must participate in the devcon and you must be an XSF member. If you are not yet an XSF member or you need to renew your membership, you can do so here until January 20.

Because we need to tell the hotel how many rooms we need, please contact XSF Executive Director Peter Saint-Andre or XSF Chair Alexander Gnauck by Friday, January 18 if you would like to take advantage of this offer.

See you in Brussels!

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.

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).

Over the last year or so we’ve been working to incorporate feedback from the widespread implementation and deployment of XMPP technologies into the core definitions of XMPP. That has been happening through revisions to two Internet-Drafts at the IETF: draft-saintandre-rfc3920bis and draft-saintandre-rfc3921bis . As part of that effort, we have also published a protocol feature set that can be used when companies and open-source projects that have implemented XMPP submit interoperability reports to the IETF (based on a proposal by Larry Masinter in the IETF’s NEWTRK Working Group).

These formal specifications are definitely not marketing documents! They are dry, boring, highly technical protocol definitions. But they provide the basis for all of our work with XMPP technologies, which is why it is so important to get the details right. Before we seek approval of the revised XMPP specifications within the IETF, broad review is needed from the full range of XMPP developers and community members, so if you have feedback please send it to the standards@xmpp.org discussion list or to the document editor directly.

Thanks!