Extended Conversation

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 — Plug-in system for Gajim (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Adam Czachorowski — Metacontacts support and various roster
  improvements for Psi (Mentor: Remko Tronçon)
• Tomas Karasek — Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (XEP-0124) support in Gajim Jabber client (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Aleksey Palazchenko — Psi: Message history (Mentor: Kevin Smith)
• Safa Sofuoğlu — Updating and Improving BOSH Support of Openfire (Mentor: Gaston Dombiak)
• Paweł Wiejacha — 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!

Although the Google Summer of Code ended weeks ago, we neglected to post a final summary. All of the XMPP-related projects ended successfully and all of our students continue to contribute to the community. You can download their code here and you can view final project reports from our students at the following links:

• Armando Diaz-Jagucki on PEP support in the Openfire server
• Bernardo Antonio de la Ossa Pérez on Extended Stanza Addressing support in the ejabberd server
• Brendan Taylor on Encrypted Sessions support in the Gajim client
• Matthew Wild on HTTP Binding / BOSH support in the gloox library
• Tobias Markmann on his Data Forms designer
• Tomasz Melcer on Jingle support in the Gajim client

Congratulations to all our students and thanks to all our mentors!

Every year is an election for the XMPP Standards Foundation, because since 2001 we have elected a new XMPP Council (our technical leadership team) and a new Board of Directors (our business leadership team) in late August or September. Naturally, this year is no exception. As XSF Secretary Alexander Gnauck recently announced, we will be holding our election meeting on September 27, although our online voting process will begin on September 8. In accordance with our bylaws, any XSF member is welcome to stand for election to the Council, and any person is welcome to stand for election to the Board. Simply create an appropriate page on the wiki before September 7 and you will automatically be considered for election. We’re always looking for smart, dedicated people to serve on the Board and Council, so don’t be shy. If you have questions about the responsibilities and time commitments, feel free to ask any of the current or past Board and Council members, or talk with XSF Executive Director Peter Saint-Andre.