[JDEV] IMPP submission

[Eliot Landrum]

Hello! Thanks for the great email, you've obviously been thinking. :)

On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 05:29:11PM -0500, Matt Shook wrote:
> 
> I read eliot's IMPP submission on Advogato, and was very impressed, but
> I have a few questions about IMPP itself, and what the Jabber
> community's strategies are.
> 
> I realize that several big companies (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft?) are going
> to be submitting too.

Nobody really knows who exactly is submitting. We imagine several of the big ones will submit. Personally, I doubt Yahoo or Microsoft will submit much of anything. Microsoft seems to be more of the mindset of the entire IETF... "let's use someone else's work." Who knows what AOL is doing.. I'm confused.

> Do the people involved think that Jabber's
> position as a thoroughly open and flexible standard will give it more
> priority over currently proprietary systems?

Well, really.. I expect we will have somewhat of an advantage just being an IMPLEMENTED system. Something not many folks can boast. 

> Or do they expect to be
> drowned out by the mega-corporations?

Quite prossible.

> Is there a possibility the IETF will declare Jabber the standard, as is,
> or with only minor modifications?

Highly doubtful. There are a couple of things that we have "problems" with (security, MIME) that the IETF will frown on. (I talked about these in the Protocol RFC.) But then again, we have an IMPLEMENTED system.... that helps our case tremendously.

> What if the declared standard is nothing like Jabber?  Do we just make a
> transport for it, and continue on our way?

Sounds good to me. :) We won't go back and change everything we've done, but considering what they want (as specified in the two RFCs that I mentioned in our protocol RFC), we probably won't need to do much to conform to whatever standard they approve.

> What if the standard is mostly Jabber-like, but with significant changes
> (i.e. security features)?  Could this result in a complete overhaul of
> the server, clients, transports, etc.?

It won't happen. We've spent 2 years actually implementing this thing and I don't believe we will throw it all away to implement a completely different system. Hopefully we can just add a new transport and go on our merry little way. :)

> So far, the only submissions on IETF's page appear to be joint works by
> employees of Microsoft, Alcatel and others.

Those aren't full submissions anyway, just examples of what might be done. Like I said, it's all talk and no implementatino. (Feel free to prove me wrong.. there's lots of info out there that I may not be up-to-date on.)

> I believe I heard AOL,
> Tribal Voice, and Yahoo will also be submitting.  Are there going to be
> any other open source submissions that I don't know about?

Probably the only other one capable of such is Gale (http://www.gale.org). Otherwise, there simply isn't anything.

> -Matt Shook

Do I know you from somewhere? I can't find you on Advogato, but I'm *sure* I've seen you somewhere...

Anyway, I hope this message clears up a couple of things. Most of this message is my own personal speculation, and doesn't reflect the official opinion of Jabber, yadda yadda yadda... Nearly all of this IETF IMPP stuff is politics. It's not real geeky stuff... 

-- 
Eliot Landrum
eliot at landrum.cx
GnuPG ID: 8F5B499E

-Soli Deo Gloria-
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