[Foundation] name change proposal

[Matt Tucker]

Ben,

> I strongly agree with Tony that the risks far outweigh the benefits.
> Establishing the Jabber name has been a hard fought battle for a number of
> years. Raising the name, and the protocol, to the awareness of the general
> public hasn't been easy,

What general public awareness? There really is none right now. The IETF 
process changes all of that, which is an oppurtunity we need to latch 
onto with a name change.

> and only now are we beginning to be able to break
> into more mainstream news coverage.

Actually, all recent mainstream news coverage has been about XMPP and 
not Jabber. A few people have pointed out a bunch of articles. If you've 
seen that the opposite is true, I'd invite you to post some links. This 
points out one of the risks of not changing the name: the marketplace 
will embrace XMPP from the IETF but will ignore the JSF extensions 
because they use the brand as a single commercial organization.

> A change now would only lead to
> confusion, and a huge cost to the momentum of the community and the brand.
> I do understand the concerns of some commercial operations with using a
> name that may be confused with a competitor of theirs, but I think Tony's
> XMPP.ORG idea may be a step in a better direction.

We can't have it both ways. We either brand the protocol and the 
extensions as Jabber or we don't. If we don't, the organization that 
leads the protocol and the extensions shouldn't be named Jabber either. 
How can we have a "step in a better direction"? I do agree with Tony's 
idea that it makes sense to have seperate protocol and general community 
organizations, though.

> I completely disagree
> with the assertion in the proposals that the JSF is only a standards
> organization.

The proposal does not say that the JSF is *only* a standards 
organization, but it does assert that the protocol work is the chief 
thing we do. I really think that it is. In any case, the proposal is not 
to change anything about what the JSF actually does -- just the name.

> While that process currently is central to the community, I
> believe it was created with the intention of being an organization to
> bring together all things Jabber, including the sponsorship of developers
> and development of various open-source projects.

I thought there was general agreement by the membership that the JSF 
isn't about sponsorship of developers or open-source projects, but I 
could be wrong. :) I agree with you and Tony that those things are very 
valuable, though. They just don't fit in so well with an organization 
focused on protocol development.

> surely
> there is a solution that can be found that doesn't require us to rip the
> Jabber identity away from the community, the software, the projects and
> the protocol that have made Jabber Software Foundation what it is today.

I think you have a misperception about what this proposal is. We are not 
proposing taking away the Jabber terminology from the larger community 
whatsoever. This proposal says nothing about the many open source 
projects using the Jabber terminology, such as jabberd. This proposal is 
only about renaming the JSF and the protocol extensions it develops to 
create a more open and fair playing field for everyone.

Regards,
Matt