17 Jul
2026
17 Jul
'26
3:41 p.m.
On Fri, Jul 17, 2026, at 7:48 AM, Jonas Schäfer wrote:
Why would their change? They were licensed under the old regime and there's no reason
for that to change. But IANAL.
Hello,
as a holder of one of the "sublicenses" I'd like to weigh in with a couple
of
notes.
On Freitag, 17. Juli 2026 15:05:40 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Peter Saint-
Andre wrote:
Come on, this is a small community in which all developers active enough to be creating a
named project know how to raise issues on email lists, in chatrooms, or via GitHub. If
they send an email to a lesser-known alias, they know where to complain, which is just
what you've done.
And if anyone would like to volunteer to actually help with iteam issues, feel free. The
last time I attempted to migrate the email lists to mailman3 it didn't go so well and
all I heard was complaints, not offers to assist.
1. I think people are getting worked about
something that is no longer
relevant. Use of the JABBER mark in our community was common over 20
years ago but nowadays developers aren't asking to use the mark. We
changed the name of the technology to XMPP when we formed the XMPP WG at
the IETF in 2002 and subsequently the name of the JSF to the XSF. Why
are we spending cycles on this in 2026?
Note 1: As pointed out in a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, trademark@ is
currently dysfunctional and we don't know how long that has been. We don't
know whether there are people who would have liked to acquire a sublicense but
have not been able to. Note 2: I agree with others that the Jabber name is
still a better name for
the federated instant messaging network based on RFC 6120+ than "XMPP".
It's a
much easier to pronounce word.
It *does* have issues (like being basically burnt in a lot of tech circles
#JabberIs(Not)Dead) and there's the trademark baggage, but it's still the best
term we've got (Zimpy did not take off ;-)).
IMO, XMPP is to Jabber like SMTP is to Email. (Even though XMPP should be to
Chat like what SMTP is to Email, but well, XMPP was too late for that.)
Web is easier to say than HTTP and email is easier to say than SMTP, but the browsers have
names like Firefox, Brave, and Chrome, and the email clients have names like Thunderbird.
This is a red herring. Get creative with your software names, as everyone else has over
the last 20+ years (Conversations, Snikket, Beagle, etc.).
3. If the XSF
moves from U.S. domicile to European domicile, I have
suggested that we not attempt to transfer the sublicensing authority to
"XSF-EU"; at that point, if the rare open-source project wants to
license the mark, it can do so directly with Cisco. We set up the
sublicensing program only because we foresaw the need for lots of
licensed uses of the mark, and that's no longer the case.
Note 3: I think this stance is valid. However, I wonder what happens to
existing "sublicensed" uses. Is the name I have requested (JabberCat) still
valid to use? This should IMO be clarified before such a move is made.
We can certainly process this late torrent of applications before the sublicensing program
goes away (if indeed it does - we've been talking about this move from the U.S. to the
E.U. for years).
At the very least, if we cannot fully clarify the
legal situation, we MUST
inform current "sublicense" holders that they should contact Cisco about their
use and get a blessing from Cisco *before* the XSF-US is dissolved.
If the Board wishes to retain expensive legal counsel to clarify this matter, they are
free to do so.
Peter