We are very pleased to announce that Openfire has breeched one million downloads (not including downloads not from our site)!

We couldn't have done it without you all, the Ignite Realtime community!  (well of course not, we needed -someone- to download it    )  It's always fun to watch a milestone come and go, and take a moment to reflect, so I thought I would take a little bit to talk about Openfire's history, and even a little about my own personal history with it.

When I first found what is now called Openfire, it was somewhere in early 2006.  At the time it was called Jive Messenger and I was the lead developer of PyAIMt and PyICQt and was told that my transports didn't work well with Jive Messenger.  It wasn't long before I 'fell in love with' Jive Messenger and around the middle of 2006, I began work on the IM Gateway plugin.

Not long after, I watched Jive Messenger turn into Wildfire, run into a naming conflict, and then turn into Openfire.  As it turned out, Openfire became probably the most appropriate name, as it better reflected the open nature of the product, and was really catchy!

So approximately two years after I first became aware of Openfire, we've hit one million downloads!  That's pretty impressive for a server product!  Over those two years we've witnessed so many milestones in the world of XMPP.  One might even call it a "boom time" for XMPP at this point.  So lets all have a drink to Openfire's one millionth download, and to XMPP everywhere!  And also, we at Jive will be having a virtual toast to the Ignite Realtime community, and thank you for all of your involvement!  Happy road to two million!