Jabber Could Get An IETF Working Group

21mhz writes: "There is a story on CNET news that provides an analysis of what is happening with SIP/SIMPLE, AOL protocols and Jabber/XMPP in the IETF. It says that Jabber is close to securing a dedicated IETF working group, in spite of political struggle and corporate maneuvering."

Comments

Re:Links

[CBAS]

RhymBox - an open source client in DHTML

Jabber for what, and for who?

[cullenfluffyjennings]

I was at the Jabber BOF and it was quite interesting.

One thing is that jabber was presented as a solution not for instant messaging (IM) or presence protocol (PP) but as a solution for asynchronous transfer of XML. Another BOF, XML Conf, was suggesting there was a requirement for this sort of stuff to provision routers and such.

Most people seemed to feel that Jabber had major issues from a security and privacy point of view for doing IMPP. Remember that the IETF did look at jabber a few years ago for doing IMPP and it was rejected. Since then, many protocols have been proposed. IM can send message in "page mode" where you are just sending a one time message or it can set up a whole session between the clients for cases where you are going to transfer many message back and forth. This second mode is called session mode. Right now the SIMPLE group more or less has a good proposal for page mode and setting up sessions but is debating how to transfer messages in session mode.

I believe that the following companies have said they will support SIMPLE: Microsoft, Yahoo, Lotus, etc. Unlike what the CNET article said, I was told that AOL filed documents with the FCC saying they would do SIMPLE.

If there is a IETF WG on jabber, which I believe might happen, the interesting thing will be to read what that groups chatter is to do - I bet it won't say that it is gong to developed a complete IMPP solution.

On a side note about how this effects open source development, I work with the vovida.org project which develops voice over IP and messaging open source software. We have talked to the jabber.org and jabber.com multiple times. It's always been difficult to figure out how this all fits together from an open source point of view. You see, jabber.com has patents on stuff you need to implement jabber. At the Jabber BOF at IETF I specifically asked them if they would make this IPR available in a way that worked for open source people. They answered that people had implements this stuff and they weren't suing them. This is like yah, DUH, of course when we are trying to get people addicted to the drug we don't sue them. They have NEVER made any commitment to allow this IPR to be used in open source products. They are a desperate company looking for a way to make a business model out of jabber. If you think jabber is the best for open source - give that some careful thought.

Cullen

so is JXTA..

[linuxislandsucks]

I would say that JXTA is alos close to securing its own working group fo standards inclusion..

The major difference between Jabber and JXTA is that Jabber runs like a standard IM in that there is a centralized server..

JXTa however does not use any central server.. its straight P2p decentralized..

INfo:

http://www.jabber.org

http://www.jxta.org

Now guess which one is imune from DMCA legal attacks? JXTA! Jabber deployment would stil get your compnay in hot water because they would go after the company that hosts the central server..

Re:Fantastic

[FattMattP]

A little off-topic, but did anyone else notice this item on the PSI page?

We recently learned that a commercial entity has taken Psi's source code and made a closed source product from it. They have chosen not to release the source to their derivative work, thus violating the terms of the Psi licence, the GPL.

We are currently in talks with both the FSF and this commercial entity, and we'll be sure to let you all know if and when it's resolved. To protect the aforementioned company from hordes of angry Psi users and GPL advocates, we choose not to disclose their name. Don't even ask us, we won't tell... unless, of course, they decide to continue using the Psi code without releasing the source to their product, then you can have them.

Jabber on Trillian

[catbutt]

I sure hope someone is ready with a Jabber plugin for Trillian when version 1.0 comes out. (which will allow plug-ins.....incidentally, their beta version of 1.0 -- which is under tight wraps but it leaked so it's not hard to find -- has a Slashdot plugin, which is kind of cool)

Trillian is in my opinion a much better way to have interoperability with the Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AOL, than by using Jabber (trillian's interoperability is client side, jabber's is server side). Trillian works great and doesn't add an extra, unnecessary layer to communication with the non-Jabber people.

Still, I'd like to use Jabber as my "main" account on Trillian, if only it supported it. That would be the best of both worlds. Trillian's client is by far the best I have seen.

BTW, I'm told that version 1.0 will also run on linux and OSX.