XSF Discussion - 2019-03-19

Guus: can we please add a bunch of huge, dangerous-looking, red crosses to the Pidgin line on our clients list? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19423513

The context was my claim that a monolithic spec won't help with fragmentation as the latter is just the result of missing manpower on the implementation side.

relevant sub-thread link is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421634

Ge0rG: fwif, Matthew here says that the authors of such clients themselves deemed them unfinished.

I wasn't aware you are one of Pidgin's authors.

ralphm: I'm not. I'm from the "Pidgin is damaging the XMPP ecosystem and should be banned" fraction.

I have no idea of how the Pidgin authors perceive their standing re XMPP, except for overhearing their refusal to acccept Compliance Suite 2019 as a task for GSoC.

I think we've had this discussion. As much as I might agree about the quality is the thing, and its, eh, value as an antique, it is still an XMPP client no matter how hard you argue against this.

I'm also sad that our Compliance Badges never materialized.

Ge0rG: design them and they will

<backspace><backspace><backspace><backspace> what he said.

also: what he said.

feel free to create some 🙂

you _really_ don't want _me_ to design them.

that's what everyone says.

(specificly, references to themselves, not to you 😉 )

I made an app logo that looks like a horny penis (according to a review on Google Play).

Ge0rG: or force^Hcoerce^Hask somebody to do it on your behalf.

but you can arrange for them to be created just as well as anyone else.

Ge0rG: counterpoint Slack

ralphm: He says the point of a monolithic protocol is just that client devs clearly see what's missing from their software. While I still believe XMPP devs are simply mostly time to implement something rather than being confused about what the heck to implement.

if only by doing this: https://trello.com/c/3TyQIUUq/335-post-an-unpaid-job-for-compliance-badges-at-osd

ralphm: Slack is a counterpoint to what?

Basically it's just a typical forum rant where he refuses to admit that the real problem is manpower, not XEPs.

Holger I think it's a combination, probably.

Holger: I understand that point, he's made it before. It has merit and downsides.

I.e. he refuses to admit that I'm right and he's wrong. Very typical issue on forums.

Guus: so nobody posted it there yet?

And yes, Matrix has the young-project advantage.

Ge0rG I didn't check, but I'd have thought that if that happened, it'd be mentioned on that Trello card

(and/or the card would've been removed)

Seve did you get around to posting that?

And sure he has a point about the XEP mess being inconsistent and confusing.

Ge0rG: people have opinions on what the new Slack logo represents.

Guus, the badges job? I plan to do it during this week, still need to check what we discussed so I can ask for something specific

Holger: maybe. In theory our policy is rather clear, we have Final and Draft standards. Maybe more of them should be Final.

ralphm: Yes but in practice the answer to the question "how do I implement avatars" isn't obvious.

it doesn't look too hard to fill that job posting. Do we have a volunteer contact person from The Board?

ralphm: And this is not a temporary issue, it's been that way for many years, and various other such questions. And I do think that's problematic when you want to convince a new client dev to use XMPP.

Ge0rG no. You just volunteered, I think.

Ge0rG, I created that card because we couldn't get a designer

Guus: roger wilco

So my idea to pursue the badges thing (which I was not super enthusiast with it) was to post a job there and see if we get some interest there

Holger: yes, people have argued this many times, I happen to agree, yet nobody has taken the time to actually work on this problem.

Holger, something you would do so good :D wink wink

Seve - Ge0rG is saying he can do the job posting, unless you want to do it yourself.

And/or somehow expects others (like Board/Council) to do this for them.

Ahh ok Guus

Ge0rG, it is fine by me, go ahead :)

brainfart: should we start paying people to do tasks like that? As in, hire/employ people?

ralphm, Seve: Well I mentioned before that I'd be motivated to participate in a group that works on cleaning up the mess. The problem I see is that our workflows (as spec'ed in 0001 and cultivated over time) don't make it easy to form such a group and provide them the necessary means. I certainly don't expect Council to be this group, as Council's job is, by definition, approving/rejecting individual XEPs rather than working towards a consistent set of extensions.

Holger, what exactly in 0001 in stopping you? I'd be happy to try and remove those blockages for you

Writing auxillary documentation requires no interaction, approval, or anything.

(also, just getting a bunch of people together to do the work and make suggestions doesn't need 0001-type approval)

I get where our rules are coming from, and I do appreciate how they try to make sure no interested party can 'take over' the protocol without some kind of community consensus.

That's not my intent anyway.

But they did result in the current mess and do make it hard to elect a group of a few people and provide them the means of cleaning it up.

I'm not entirely sure this is the job of the XSF tbh, I'd say that's up to something like the xdf/jsf/whatever. We can improve discoverability of the XEPs by tagging, or search engines and whatnots, but in the end what I think is blocking is recommendations on which XEPs to use for what purpose

While the XSF has an important role in the community, it is *not* the end all and be all of things XMPP.

"There's N XEPs for this purpose, use _this one_"

("and _like this_")

Holger why don't you simply get started with some rough drafts of what you envision, maybe on the wiki, or somewhere else.

You can start a documentation project like this right now, giving guidance on choice of certain specifications, code examples, etc.

While various people would like to see the XSF to engage in various other things such as marketing and whatnot, I'd like to see it sticking to specs. But I *do* think the XSF is the obvious party responsible for specs.

ralphm, yes, there's already something started, the rest is lack of resources. (Note that I'm not complaining here)

Oh well, I think I'm not gonna dive into this discussion again right now, sorry. I understand that I'm pretty alone with my viewpoint, that's fine. Maybe I'm just wrong.

Holger, you're welcome to join and help :)

Yes yes.

Holger, fwiw, I don't think that there's much disagreement here.

Holger: where do you get the idea that I disagree?

Holger, I think the XSF is the obvious party responsible for providing specs. I don't think it's the obvious party to recommend what specs to use among the many they provide

ralphm: You're suggesting "writing auxillary documentation". I disagree this would solve our problem.

I just think the XSF is not, and should, be in your way to make this happen.

Should not

If you want to carry this with out within the XSF, you can do so.

But it is not required

Holger: I think Ralphm nor me understand the issue that you're trying to make.

I'm also confused

I'm very much in agreement with Ralph that I don't think that there should be anything in the XSF processes that should prevent you to do whatever it is you want to do.

Holger, I guess what the XSF can do about this is tagging XEPs, maybe, and providing some kind of smart search, I don't think it can do much more

(https://xmpp.org/extensions/ this could probably be improved a bit towards this)

Holger: so what do you want done, specifically?

Holger, specifically, what improvements would you like to see happen?

Maybe it is not just writing some side information about how to do things, but actually modifying XEPs and so on?

Hehe the "not going into this right now" part doesn't work out well ;-)

Distracted by work right now sorry.

Gonna try to avoid ranting while being busy in the future.

ok, fair enough - but if there's something that can be done to improve things, I'd very much like to hear that suggestion.

Holger, haha :) No worries we are patient, will be here when you are ready again

if only to be able to thoroughly disagree 😉

I think the pages at https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview.html and https://xmpp.org/uses/ might be good starting points.

the pages below https://xmpp.org/uses/ need some serious work

Ge0rG I invite you to work on it as soon as you finish that OSD job posting 😉

> if only to be able to thoroughly disagree 😉 I kind of regret typing that, for fear it could be misunderstood as anything but being a joke. I truly welcome suggestions for improvement.

Guus: let me fire up my time machine, travel three months into the past and start!

*zwoooosh*

https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/490

I see that the level of sarcasm hasn't changed in those three months! 😉

as an aside: do you still want a listing on igniterealtime?

Guus: I've had a very hard time convincing my employer, so it's currently on hold.

I'd love to see more entries on that list - yours would be very much welcome.

ok - and you're not in a position to do this as a freelancer?

Guus: it needs to fit our long-term strategy, which we don't have yet. And it needs to have more than one person backing it

ah, requirements to adhere to definitions that do not exist!

Guus: I'm a full-time employed IT-sec consultant, and my freelance time is what remains after that, my OSS coding, and private life.

Ge0rG I don't expect that you'd get much full-time job offerings through that page.

(and if so, you could always decline them, or redirect them)

Guus: I'm not taking freelance jobs, and it might be a bit dishonest to advertise me as a freelancer and then to redirect all requests to my employer.

and making it official requires at least semi-formal support

also being listed there as a freelancer requires (legally) me telling my employer about it.

I ment redirecting it to other community members, but, sure.

Guus: I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

I'm in no way suggesting you should do something behind the back of your employer.

Ge0rG the point would be to help raise paid support for Smack

Guus: I'm currently in a sad situation regarding that, and I hope I will be able to resolve that before summer

which would help the ecosystem a lot.

I think there are two ways how I can motivate my employer. Either by providing a strong link to IT security (e.g. by leveraging one of the threat monitoring signalling XEPs), or to IoT

but both are rather weak at this time

I'm unsure how to help you there.

best I can do is to offer to figure out if I can help you out with a legal vehicle, in case you ever want to walk a different path than your employer, in the future.

I need to submarine our company by hiring XMPP nerds who are also interested in IT-sec

and/or find a customer.

or a research project

So many options! I'm amazed that it didn't happen yet!

quack

Seems I missed a discussion this morning

> 10:24:44 ralphm> You can start a documentation project like this right now, giving guidance on choice of certain specifications, code examples, etc.

https://docs.modernxmpp.org/

See, it can be done :-)

I forgot about this effort. Thanks for that, MattJ.

maybe blogpost about that on xsf?

on xmpp.org, I mean.

Guus, I have a draft blog post, I think it's a good idea

Just some things I want to tidy up first

excellent!

also

can we pretty please have a webchat client on xmpp.org?

Yes please

there has been lots of discussion on this in https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/101

We used to have some, but they got unpopular due to random passers-by spamming

let's just slap converse on there

We have a bunch of tools against that these days, a bunch of XMPP projects have open web-accessible rooms with no major issues

MattJ: I think you already have the ability to do this, right?

Yep

I'll take it on (or Zash)

that would be awesome, thanks

Guus, Seve, ralphm: https://op-co.de/tmp/osd-job-description-2019-03.html (sorry, got interrupted by real work)

Hm?

Ge0rG thanks! Looks great. I've got one suggestion.

Guus: this is why I'm posting it here :)

I'd replace this one sentence with two distinct ones: "To improve the situation, we have created a Compliance Suite that provides different use cases and want to provide a set of badges that developers can attach to their clients and servers to make them more attractive and more discoverable to users."

Guus: Yeah, I tend to write overlong sentences. Do you have a specific split in mind?

I'd make it more explicit that creation of the set of badges is the purpose of the job posting.

might be as easy as: "To improve the situation, we have created a Compliance Suite that provides different use cases.<FULLSTOP, new paragraph>. To improve visibility of these suites, we want to provide a set of badges that developers can attach to their clients and servers to make them more attractive and more discoverable to users."

Guus: updated the wording

ah, yes, that also works

+1 go for it etc

Zash: you wanted to comment as well?

I think additionally...

I'm not sure I like the year in there, but I don't want to revive the topic just now.. (busy with work)

It may have to state explicitly that the full ownership of the rights to the created works lie with the XSF.

Ge0rG: That was in response to MattJ

ralphm: that's a good ppint.

Ge0rG: Text seems fine to me after a first reading.

This allows us to modify it for subsequent editions, and control their use.

ralphm: > To make it possible for the XSF to take measures against abuse of the badges by incompliant implementations, the XSF would need all exploitation rights on the created artwork. The artist should be ready to assign all those rights to the XSF.

Some context https://web.archive.org/web/20060307012442/http://jabberpowered.org:80/guidelines.html

(you cannot reasign copyright)

Ge0rG: you can totally reassign copyright, or author's rights in countries like ours, especially if works were made to order.

What you can typically not reassign are moral rights.

Like the ability to say *you* created the work.

you cannot reasign copyright where I live :>

IANAL, wording suggestions are welcome

Copyright is usually two-part, as ralphm says

https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/ipr-policy

is what we have coded up for XEPs

A long time ago, I have sent this "logo" for the XMPP planet: https://planet.jabber.org/images/xmpp.png

bah, my client is misbehaving. Apologies for out-of-context / duplicate messages.

Ge0rG: you totally can as I described, Dutch law is not very different from German law in that respect.

Neustradamus: I don't see how this is relevant. We're talking about Compliance Suites, and Planet Jabber is not a function of the XSF.

Without needing to go into the details of what is possible under law: the text as-is looks ok to me.

ralphm: I've changed the wording, do you approve?

(reload the above link)

Guus: indeed, in many jurisdictions things are different. This is probably why Lawrence Lessig was involved with our IPR policy. I'm sure Peter Saint-André has more details on this.

I think so yes

I really don't want more details on this right now 🙂

Okay, I'm going to post the job then.

Ge0rG: thanks for doing this.

I also noticed that we have some naming issues in the CS. What if you only implement https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0412.html#core - are you an "Advanced Core Server"? A "Core Core Client"?

What if you implement IM _and_ Mobile?

Does it make sense to have "Advanced|Core Mobile Web"?

Advanced Mobile Web IM Client 2019 Plus Plus.

With sugar on top.

whoops. ✏

Even though you missed it, there was a related discussion about a pretty red pretty pretty car at the last XSF dinner...

Posted. Please make a note in https://trello.com/c/3TyQIUUq/335-post-an-unpaid-job-for-compliance-badges-at-osd

commented and archived the trello card

lovely small square clean antique red flowery Dutch wooden storage box

See?! _that's_ what happens when you feed him to much dame blanche

Hey Ge0rG, I was not available until now. Looks super good, I'm really happy to pass that task to you, honestly :) Please, let me know the url of the job post whenever you have it, so I can write something for the newsletter as well. Again, thank you very much!

Seve: sure, can do