I'm happy to announce that we're making most of Openfire Enterprise Open Source! First, a bit of context: for the past couple of years, one way that we (Jive Software) have monetized our Open Source work on Openfire and the other projects on igniterealtime.org has been through Openfire Enterprise. Openfire Enterprise addresses the Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) market by adding rich reporting, archiving, and control features on top of Openfire. Since we released Clearspace last year, Jive has become super-focused on social collaboration and communities. That's pretty different than the EIM market and it's become increasingly difficult for us to serve both markets with our limited resources. Instead, we want to focus our Openfire work on real-time social and collaborative features and monetize our Open Source efforts through Clearspace integrations.

Existing Customers

Discontinuing a commercial product is always a difficult decision and one of our biggest concerns is not leaving existing customers in a lurch. We'll continue to provide support for Openfire Enterprise through existing support contracts and believe that making the Enterprise components Open Source is the best possible outcome for customers given the options. We remain strongly committed to the Openfire project and are pretty excited about what's coming in the future.

A Few Details

Gato will have a follow-up blog post with a lot more details about what we're releasing as Open Source and how, but I wanted to highlight two items. Sparkweb is our flex-based web client based on XIFF and will become Open Source. The client is already very feature rich and polished, and we're actively making many code improvements to it, as it's a shared code base with the real-time client features we're building into Clearspace. Second, the clustering functionality in Enterprise will not be made Open Source. Part of the reason for this is that we use a third-party commercial library for clustering  that can't be Open-sourced.

Let's Go Get 'em

One of our hopes with this move is that the last possible objection to deploying XMPP-based instant messaging at every organization in the world is now removed. Now, everyone will have access to an open standards solution that satisfies all the needs of IT departments... for free. We think that's great news for the community and getting our technology deployed even more widely is good for Jive Software as well. We hope you'll join us in spreading the word.

So, what's up with Spark? Many of you have commented on the fact that the pace of development has slowed and that Derek is less present in the community. Now that a major new version of SparkWeb is out, it seems like a good time to provide a more detailed status report on everything happening around client development.

First up, an announcement: Derek has taken a new position (Sales Engineer) inside of Jive. So far he seems to be loving it, but I'll let him comment on this blog post with further details. Unfortunately, that means that Spark has lost its lead developer. For the time being, other team members have stepped in to help out. We're committed to providing bug fixes and minor new fixes to Spark for the foreseeable future. It remains one of the best cross-platform XMPP clients available.

Since Spark development is slowing down, what's next? Most of Jive's XMPP client efforts are now focused on the web via the SparkWeb Flash client. We're using the same technology base to add real-time features to Clearspace. Further, the upcoming Adobe Air technology offers the intriguing possibility of building a new desktop client using Flash. To us, it all seems like the perfect triple play -- a single code base that can be used for Sparkweb, Clearspace features and a new Spark desktop client. Only Sparkweb is ready so far, but you'll see new real-time features in Clearspace soon and we'll keep everyone updated on a desktop client based on Adobe Air.

Change isn't always easy and I'm sure that some of you will be disappointed to hear that our approach to how we build Spark is changing. There may be some rough spots as we move from one technology to another, but we're pretty excited about where things are headed.

OSCON 2007 is wrapping up and it was a great conference. Yesterday I gave a talk about Jingle, an extension to XMPP (Jabber) that's primarily used for VoIP. The slides are available on Slideshare (including a link to download the Powerpoint).

At the beginning of the week, we participated in the XMPP Devcon event. Peter provided details about the topics of discussion from day one and day two on his blog.

We (Jive Software) launched Clearspace X just about one month ago, our external community software product that combines discussions, wiki documents and blogging. [As an aside, we provide free Clearspace X licenses to Open Source projects.] So, why aren't we using it here on igniterealtime.org yet? There's lots of good excuses, but we've been hard at work on the migration and it will happen soon. What will the change to Clearspace X mean?

• The same discussions functionality we have with Jive Forums, but with an updated UI.

• Migration of the blog engine to the Clearspace platform (this will be fairly transparent).

• A rich new set of functionality around wiki documents. We're already planning lots of great content.

We're looking forward to the new features and to getting your feedback on them. I'll post more migration details in the forums soon.

I don't usually get annoyed by other blog entries in the XMPP blogosphere, but this one got my goat a bit: the claim that ejabberd is the most popular XMPP server (according to ohloh). Not only that, but their previous blog entry crowed about passing the 120,000 download mark. So, I thought it was time to set the record straight:

• Openfire is now the most popular XMPP server according to ohloh. Why the sudden change? Easy; I read the ohloh FAQ, which states that popularity is based on Yahoo page ranking. The Openfire project page on ohloh linked to a deep page in the ignite site (something that people would never link to). I simply copied ejabberd and made the page link be the main website. Sure enough, we're now the top server listing.

• Openfire just passed 827,753 downloads.

• The igniterealtime.org discussion forums have 53,348 messages, compared to 4025 on the ejabberd site.

Anyway, my apologies for the pissing match, but we have to be willing to step up when directly called out. I do think it's a great thing that there seems to be such vitality in the XMPP world.

I've recently run into a number of innovative sites and products that use Openfire.

!http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/imified.gif![IMified|http://www.imified.com/] provides tools like task management, reminders and todo's through IM bots on AIM, MSN, and XMPP/GTalk. They've just released an API that will make it easy to write bots that work across all major IM networks. Openfire powers their XMPP back-end. !http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/mosoto.gif![Mosoto|http://www.mosoto.com/] is a real-time collaboration application for Facebook that includes chat along with file and music sharing. They're one of the premier implementors of the Facebook API and have a slick Flash client UI. The service is now in Alpha, but should mature and grow quickly (especially given the size of the Facebook userbase). They use both Openfire and the XIFF Flash API.

  !http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/justintv.gif! Finally, we were told at the Web 2.0 conference that the chat feature on Justin.tv is powered by Openfire. I haven't had a chance to to verify that yet, but if true, it's cool that we're part of such an interesting social experiment. If you haven't seen the site yet, Justin wears a portable camera 24x7 that streams a live video feed to the website. I personally can't imagine broadcasting my life, but I have to respect the social commentary. In a world where we're always connected and available through cellphones and IM, this guy is really always connected and available... to the entire world.

These three examples are part of a broader trend: I think that XMPP will become a critical piece of infrastructure for a large number of next-generation web efforts, including Google. Recent protocol advances like BOSH (XMPP for web pages), Jingle (voice and video) and PEP (advanced presence features) will only further help drive adoption.

  !http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/props.png! Earlier today, LG (IT2000) passed Gato to become the top point earner in the ignite community forums. It's the first time ever that an outside community member has jumped ahead of Jive Software engineers, which is a pretty impressive feat. With a current score of 3475 and 5 to 10 points per question answer, that's a lot of people he's helped out -- especially considering that not everyone remembers to award points.

So in the spirit of Ali G, all of us at Jive Software want to offer mad props to LG.

  Today we re-launched Wildfire using the Openfire name. Along with the name change, we also have a great new logo. I wanted to provide some details about how the name change is being implemented to decrease confusion.

First, you'll notice that all website content has been updated to Openfire. There may be a few broken links still, so if you notice anything please let us know. We're also reaching out to external sites that still use the old Wildfire name and asking them  to make updates.

The product releases will work as follows:

• 3.2.x series: these releases will continue to use the Wildfire name so that critical bug fixes can be delivered with minimal hassle to existing users. In fact, we're releasing 3.2.3 today.

• 3.3.x series: starting with 3.3.0, the server is called Openfire. There will be a small amount of upgrade pain associated with this release since configuration files like wildfire.xml will now be openfire.xml, etc. We'll be releasing 3.3.0 beta early next week, with a final release following as soon as we can ensure the upgrade process is as smooth as possible.

Again, my deep thanks to everyone for all the support you've given us during the name change process. A lot of the hard work is already out of the way at this point, so now it's time to spread the word as much as possible!