FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DENVER, CO, USA, JANUARY 16, 2007 -- Reflecting its longtime focus on Internet protocol development as well as the tremendous growth in adoption of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for real-time communication, the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) has changed its name to the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF).
The JSF was founded in 2001 as an open forum for definition and extension of the streaming XML technologies that grew out of the open-source Jabber project started by Jeremie Miller in 1999. Since the beginning, the organization has focused on defining open protocols rather developing open-source software. In 2002, the JSF contributed the core Jabber protocols to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) under the name Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Meanwhile, the JSF has continued to lead the Jabber/XMPP developer community through publication of XMPP extensions, hosting of interoperability testing events, and deployment of a certification authority for XMPP servers.
At the same time, adoption of XMPP has skyrocketed. It is estimated that there are 40 to 50 million end users of XMPP technologies on the Internet today. Vendors and service providers such as Apple, Digium, Google, IBM, LiveJournal, Nokia, NTT, Psion, Sony, and Sun Microsystems have all implemented support for XMPP in open-source or commercial code. There are mission-critical XMPP deployments at most Wall Street banks, numerous major corporations, high-profile agencies of the U.S. federal government, and countless universities and small businesses worldwide. And the percentage of those organizations participating in the process of standardizing XMPP extensions continues to grow significantly, including contributions regarding voice and video integration from Google and on real-time language translation from the U.S. Department of Defense.
"The membership's decision to rename the organization truly reflects our continued development of open XMPP extensions and the increasing commercial interest in XMPP technologies," said Peter Saint-Andre, executive director of the XSF. "While we will never forget our origins in the open-source community, the name XMPP Standards Foundation captures our mission of producing the best open protocols for real-time communication over the Internet."