"There are a few things that I find ironic about most Free Software geeks. They’ll support the philosophy of GNU and Free Software until the cows come home, but they’ll continue to chat with their buddies over proprietary IM protocols, such as MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, Gadu Gadu, Skype and more. Well, it’s time to ditch the legacy IM protocols in favor of Open Standards, such as IRC, XMPP/Jabber, SIP/SIMPLE and others..."

XMPP is an open technology for instant messaging and presence information. It provides the opportunity to build an open source and free messaging server to handle many applications in varied environments. We are going to setup a XMPP server on a LAN to handle communications between LAN and WAN contacts. By running our own server we can gain some insight into how XMPP and Jabber work, create an efficient and easy to use internal communications setup, connect our server to other servers and services including WAN communications, and last, but not least, we can have our own private communications using SSL. Read on for more on XMPP and how we actually set it all up.

David Bienvenu, the other only full time Thunderbird developer has also announced he will be leaving the Mozilla Corporation next Friday. The post comes just a couple of days after Scott McGregor’s own leaving message also stating he intends to continues as a volunteer module owner.

Jabbim is a client for communication over XMPP/Jabber protocol, written in the Python language using Qt (4.3), PyQt (4.3) and Pyxl library, which is a part of the client. The aim of the Jabbim client is to make Jabber approachable for common people, so it is a client for common users and beginners. Because of this philosophy the Jabbim client might not suit everyone.

A few weeks ago FSF have reported that Google had started blocking invites sent from non-Google Jabber servers. This was done as a crude anti-spam measure. Google have since rolled out proper anti-spam filtering for its Jabber service, and has removed the invite block. This was announced a few days ago in a public mailing list post.

"...Though there are a number of IM options for Emacs, one that works particularly well with minimal fuss is Jabber.el, a robust and configurable Jabber client that supports basic Jabber/XMPP and multi-user chat. You can download it from the project's Sourceforge page ..."

The popularity of Microsoft's Live Communication Server and the many XMPP/Jabber Server implementations have tech analysts like the ones over at Slashdot asking the question "Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing'?" The advent of instant message (IM) servers has heralded the age of live communication in the enterprise.

"...You can find out more about the basics of the project here, but basically it’s an http layer on top of a common python XMPP library that lets you do most of the roster management available through XMPP by way of a simple restful api.The workflow for using it is simple, just install the app into an existing django project, and that will expose the api.

There have been reports on the Linux newswires recently of dissatisfied Ubuntu users leaving for one reason or another. I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon here, but instead just point out that in any community, especially an immature one, this is bound to happen. My message is to those who are leaving — you should put Debian at the top of your list of distros to try.