[Members] s/JSF/XSF/g

[Matt Tucker]

Peter,

Hard to believe that nobody jumped in on this topic. :) I agree with all
of your points and actually like your name proposal of XMPP Standards
Foundation quite a bit. It accurately reflects what we do, and XSF is a
good acronym. I think this is a very important step for the community
and will lead to a lot positive growth for the protocol.

Regards,
Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at jabber.org 
> [mailto:members-bounces at jabber.org] On Behalf Of Peter Saint-Andre
> Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:08 PM
> To: members at jabber.org
> Subject: [Members] s/JSF/XSF/g
> 
> In September we modified the branding of our protocol 
> specifications to more clearly describe them as XMPP 
> extensions (which IMHO is what they are). Now I think it is 
> worth thinking about perhaps taking the next
> step: changing the branding of our organization.
> 
> As we discussed (flamed about!) 2.5 years ago, the Jabber 
> Software Foundation does not produce software, so the middle 
> word in our title is simply false. Instead, we are a 
> standards development organization, so the "S" really 
> deserves to be "Standards". (It could be something like "T" 
> for "Technology" but IMHO what we do is more limited than that.)
> 
> So now we move on to the dreaded "J" word. I've been involved 
> in this community longer than anyone else here. I've been 
> involved since the days when Jabber was an open-source server 
> (version 0.7!) and not all the other things it became later 
> (a protocol, a company, etc.). I have a strong personal 
> attachment to the word Jabber -- it's catchy, it's 
> descriptive, it's personable, it's great. For me these 
> technologies are still Jabber. My license plate still reads 
> "JABBER". Et cetera.
> 
> At the same time I recognize that what our organization does 
> is standardize extensions to the Extensible Messaging and 
> Presence Protocol. We are the XMPP Standards Foundation, 
> whether we call ourselves that or not. And since that's what 
> we do, it seems appropriate for our name to reflect our 
> activities. And, naturally, changing the name of our 
> standards development organization would put us further along 
> the road of disambiguating what "JABBER" is -- see my 
> previous post about JEP -> XEP:
> 
> http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/members/2006-August/003789.html
> 
> I am not yet formally proposing that we change the name of 
> our organization to XMPP Standards Foundation. I still need 
> to perform further due diligence regarding the potential 
> costs of such a change. So far I think that the hard costs 
> will be rather minimal (business name change, updated bank 
> account information, employer identification number update, 
> etc.). I don't have as good a handle on the potential soft 
> costs. The "JABBER" name is still widely recognized, much 
> more so than XMPP. But I think that XMPP is what we do and 
> that it's not particularly necessary for our standards 
> development organization to have a catchy name.
> 
> If we change the name of the organization, all of the 
> organizational information would migrate to xmpp.org. We 
> would still have jabber.org and I think we would make it more 
> of a site for end users (that's something we need to do anyway).
> 
> BTW, I prefer "XMPP Standards Foundation" to "XMPP Standards 
> Forum" or "XMPP Technology Forum" for several reasons:
> 
> 1. We create not generic technology but protocol standards.
> 
> 2. We are a foundation that functions as an intellectual 
> property conservancy (see 
> <http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ipr-policy.shtml>) and not 
> merely as a discussion forum.
> 
> Peter
> 
> --
> Peter Saint-Andre
> Jabber Software Foundation
> http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml
> 
>