XSF Discussion - 2018-05-03

are there other ways of connecting to xmpp servers besides rfc-style starttls, bosh, websocket, and xep-0368 style direct TLS ?

https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/627 https://burtrum.org/hacx/

can XEP-0114 components send presence probes?

jonasw, yes

mrdoctorwho, cool :)

moparisthebest, I suppose this would count as bosh as well https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0252.html

unused useless whatever

5223 would be the defacto standard for _xmpps-client or is that still considered legacy?

i dont think so

was it not that back in time people thought nobody is going to use it anymore in the future

and now it seems it comes back

oh you mean the port?

I mean the port yes, since there's a srv record for it one wonders if there's a registered standard port, or if we're gonna reuse legacy ssl port out of assumption lovetox

Gajim uses 5223 if there is no srv record

There is no standard port in xep368

I hope this "marketing question" is right here: Why does https://xmpp.org/ bring the slogan "The most secure messaging standard" in focus? There are many things to say about XMPP, and it's not bad on security, but still: Is this the most relevant single thing marketing should focus on?

debacle, have a suggestion for an alternative?

(speaking of marketing, shouldn’t there be a board meeting soon-ish?)

In 40 minutes

MattJ, I don't have an alternative, but would probably highlight universality of XMPP (IM, IoT, group communication/social, VoIP), in contrast to a specific use case. Marketing people would probably object to blurring the focus in that way :~)

And open federation.

But "most secure messaging standard" doesn't sound really compelling to me.

Even if it is (were) true.

No idea how to pour this into a marketing phrase but would do we pay our marketing department for!

XMPP is a protocol standard, not an open federation

See how it's complicated? :)

remind me, which marketing department again?

An especially secure standard?

Who are we even marketing XMPP to?

debacle just became our marketing department

boohahaha

as being the only person to bring this up since the site was created

I was thinking exactly the same though :-)

(But I won't join the department.)

as if you had a choice

:-)

The subtitle is better-fitting though, I think. "Battle-tested. Independent. Privacy-focused."

agreed.

Also I second Ge0rG's question, "Who are we even marketing XMPP to?"

raise the subtitle to main title?

How about "XMPP, screw walled gardens"

hah

moparisthebest, again - WhatsApp was XMPP based, Facebook managed an XMPP walled garden for some time, and so on...

yea the who really matters, a business wants something different than privacy focused individual looking to replace LATEST_APP

xmpp.org is for developers, IMHO

I tend to agree

MattJ, that's what I would think. What do the statistics say?

I think by the time an end user reaches xmpp.org, we've lost them :)

"XMPP, screw walled gardens, unless you want to build a walled garden with XMPP, but then you should be ashamed because you are a bad, bad person"

got a bit unweildy there

:D

MattJ, buuuut... what page would an end-user reach instead? :)

I vote for moparisthebest as marketing

jonasw, doesn't currently exist

clients.html?

jonasw: The app store page.

:<

"XMPP, come to us and get lost!"

Nothing fundamentally wrong with building unfederated or not publicly federated systems with XMPP.

Ge0rG: lol, very nice.

XMPP - The Standard

"XMPP. Standards are good, and we have many to choose from"

Zash, exactly

I think we need something user-friendly at jabber.org

Ge0rG, what are you waiting for

I don't think xmpp.org should worry about this though

+w on jabber.org probably

pep.: I'm waiting for some more volunteers to start together the Jabber Software Foundation.

Ge0rG: If you want it done, you better do it yourself.

Zash: I tend to agree, except for the bus factor

starting a "foundation" all by oneself is a bit weird unless you have a few M$currency...

I say if you want traction you'd better build a service rather than a front to redirect to tons of different clients

Ge0rG, ssss the bus-factor among the XSF members!

pep., oddly enough, Ge0rG already offers a service :)

jonasw, I know

so maybe he’s at the next step?

I'm offering a service, a client and consulting.

proposed jabber.org slogan: "Jabber, use the name XMPP instead unless you have a team of lawyer's to rival Cisco"

That trademark was the single most community-hurting thing in Jabber™ history.

You mean apart from lack of money and manpower

pep.: no.

pep.: money and manpower are optional if you have some dedication and no trademark trouble

manpower is never optional.

but dedication usually implies manpower

money can buy manpower

money can buy trademarks.

we need money!

Just call it Zimpy, the chat

money and marketing!

the long-term plan would be to (a) have good clients, (b) rebrand everything to FancyNewName once the clients are ready

Here, I just saved us

jonasw: said the author of Jabber™Cat

Heh

:D

Ge0rG, the "Cat" is the important part, not the "Jabber"

jonasw: I suggest you rename it to SchrödingersCat then.

unwieldy and un-google-able

ChatCat

trademarked

CatChat?

(I fear we’re now going through the same iterations I went through before settling on Jabber™Cat)

(note that JabberCat wasn’t my first choice)

> GitHub - skylerto/chat-cat: A chat application written in Node.js. There must be some kind of Rule 34 for Node.js

lol

I'm still fed up with my "mbsync must have some way to do imap idle" research results

I have an idea, and I understand it might be controversial, but why don't we come up with a neat 4 letter acronym? What about XMPP ? :P

moparisthebest, do you know of any sucessful general-population application which uses a four-letter acronym?

ping

ah it's not

moparisthebest: we still haven't recovered from the last time we attempted that rebranding

hmm

jonasw, IMAP, HTTP ?

But yeah, Ex-MP-Pee is awesome.

moparisthebest, those are protocols, not applications

the applications are "E-mail" and "The web" on one layer of abstraction, or "Outlook"/"Gmail", "Firefox"/"Chrome"/"Internet" on another

well I mean no application is named XMPP is it?

this isn’t about naming the protocol

it’s about naming the IM network

or ecosystem

or how you wanna call it

"Let me send you an SMTP with the document when I get to the office"

exactly

MattJ: can't you send me an IMAP instead?

Ge0rG, sorry, I only JMAP

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-kundrat-imap-submit-00.html

I knew someone had to have done it

but "submit" is not a PC word

I just feel like it's about 20 years late for a rebranding

but oh well

moparisthebest: To the Time Machine!

Ge0rG, maybe why http://trojita.flaska.net/draft-imap-sendmail-00.html :)

moparisthebest: I think there is much irony in how the JSF rebranded itself into something that doesn't do ecosystem maintenance any more, a long time ago, while burning the original name with trademark complexity

moparisthebest, WhatsApp took XMPP, rebranded it to WhatsApp and was quite succesful at it

I don’t see why a dedicated community of XMPP developers couldn’t do the same, but with federation.

+1 to this

yeah

I don't think it was the name, I think it was the money

Except

Ge0rG: Well, Jabber Inc was involved somehow, then got bought by Cisco..

jonasw: because there is a lack of a dedicated developer community, SV startup funding and the trademark name is burned.

"dedicated community of XMPP developers" would totally fail :)

moparisthebest, it wouldn’t have succeeded with a crappy name like XMPP.

Because we're terrible at everything except making protocols and writing code (and some might argue we're not too good at those things either ;) )

aren't we a dedicated community of developers already?

maybe not that dedicated

pep., yeah, that’s the issue

MattJ: the one thing we excel at is bike shedding. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade - so what should we do?

Maybe go into politics?

jonasw, please free me from $dayjob

actually, I am not really allowed in this discussion as per the "no discussions unless an XMPP related commit in the last 24 hours". and I haven’t been allowed for weeks now.

Ge0rG, :D

(I /wish/ I was allowed, but among the masterthesis, a bunch of private stuff going on and the job, there isn’t much time left.)

jonasw, I don't think that's an issue specific to XMPP anyway

it’s an issue specific to FLOSS

yes

and right now there aren’t any serious non-FLOSS federating IM products

I still think it's all about money

you can push any crap product given enough money

Marketing budget!

on the other hand, companies can't make money pushing an xmpp client, because it's not a walled garden

Indeed it is

pushing a federated xmpp client*

I bet one of the first things a professional marketing person would say is "folks, you need a rebrand" ;-)

You can fail pushing a product with money but you can hardly succeed without.

client-wise Conversations seems by far the most successful, but it's a big nothing compared to whatsapp for example

jonasw: that's how they make money, right?

Holger, hah

jonasw, their first thing would be 'you need to hire me, a professional marketing person'

then since you'd expect them to do *something*, they'd probably pick something useless like that

I think the name and design of a thing matters more than you’d think, but I’m afraid we have to agree to disagree here.

to be fair I understand that means nothing at all to me and more than nothing to other people :)

I've been using linux on the desktop since 2006 if that tells you something about my tastes

It's time for the weekly board meeting. Ralph sent his apologies. Who's here?

MattJ, Martin, Nyco?

Hey

... this does not bode well.

Hello

test

we have the quorum

yey

:)

0. Role Call and Agenda

we've established that we're here

The agenda will be taken from https://trello.com/b/Dn6IQOu0/board-meetings as usual.

Does anyone want to add anything?

Nothing here

1. Minute taker

Volunteers kindly line up in rows of 5

*Rows of 0.5

I'll do it

thank you

2. Topics for discussion

(none)

sorry, for _decision_ that is.

3. Reviewing the commitment list

3.1 The membership survey on priorities

Mattj, how is that coming along?

It's fine... sorry, I should have sent it out but haven't yet

I'll aim to do it later today

Just need to draft a short email and send the link to members@

excellent

3.2 The online shop for selling swag

Nyco, I think you were going to do some further investigation, right?

jonasw, > I don’t see why a dedicated community of XMPP developers couldn’t do the same, but with federation. Because too many XEPs are written by theoreticians who don't produce working implementations.

sorry, I did not dedicate time for this

(Andrew, would you mind waiting for 20 minutes with other discussions while we have our short meeting please?)

aaah, if we had threads...

nyco, can you do it before the next meeting?

threads?

difficult, but I can find time to draft something, don't expect elaborate study

is this acceptable?

iirc people were primarily interested in the price structure and a brief comparison with alternatives

I personally don't expect an elaborate study.

that's it

ok

wfm

thanks

3.3 Collect info on the role/responsibilities of the XO

That one is assigned to Martin - I'm assuming no-one looked into this?

I don't think so, no

4. Items for discussion

4.1 Fundraising/Financials

I've not done much more on that. The treasurer did send out an email earlier today that he's trying to follow up on this later this month.

'this' being an inventory of the state of our sponsors

or at least, that's how I interpreted his message.

I am happy for us to leave it at that, for now - but maybe someone wants to discuss something related?

That's fine by me

not for me

nyco, it's not fine for you, or you don't want to discuss something related?

given no response, I'm assuming the latter.

Guus, sorry.

ah 😉 I do not want to discuss this, sorry

ok 🙂

no worries Andrew

4.2: Search for XO.

let's first get clear what the roles/responsibilities for that officer are.

Right

to bad Peter is not here, he might be able to shed some light on that.

I'll try to ping him

He already said some time back he did almost nothing in that role

I wonder if there was something that he _should_ have been doing 🙂

Our discussion led us to - maybe that position should be more active

or _could_

which we'd need to define

Finding somebody willing to do next to nothing shouldn't be too hard :)

it's the responsibility that might frighten

it's the little non-nothing to do

also any ambiguity in responsibilities

Also... 100% of the current Board is based in the EU I believe. That begs the question, must the ED be in the US?

ED will probably outlive the yearly board

I'm guessing not, but it seems a bit strange to have a US org run almost entirely from Europe :)

United States of Europe 😉

That's more related to the location where we're incorporated (<- unsure of the exact english term for that), than the location of the ED, right?

USE

USEMINUSUK soon

Guus, changing where the XSF is incorporated is a bit hard compared to anything else :)

I don't currently have any reason to believe that a non-US ED is a problem

Just curious though

I'm wondering why you bring that up in the first place

I've never given the nationality of any officer any thought at all.

which makes my curious as why you did, just now 🙂

I see it being a problem with e.g. bank account access, for example

I know you said we can put Alex on a plane, sure

That's more relevant to the role of Treasurer than ED, I think?

But it seems a bit strange having a US organisation with nobody responsible for it actually located in the US

true, but officers change. I wonder that if we act on that now, we migth end up with a similar problem anyways in a year or so.

I'm not proposing any action. Just it was a question that came to mind in the context of the ED search

ok

let's leave it at that for now then 🙂

5. AOBs

anyone?

None here

none

6. Time of next

+1w is Ascension day (and Ralph already mentioned he'd not be able to make it)

shall we do +2w?

I also may not be able to make next week

So yes, let's skip

ok +2wx

ok

thank you!

thx

Minutes sent

Thank you