David,
It turns out that I'm a member of the Jabber Foundation by an amazing and curious chance of signing up out of interest long ago. As a result, I've been privy to many a flame fest on the Jabber Foundation list regarding what you've posted.
While it's true that the Jabber license is odd and not entirely clear (it may be Open Source, but isn't Free), it is *not* a product of a company. IIRC, the JOSL doesn't contain any copy-left protection of the code, the part of the GPL that specifies that one must "share and share alike" when distributing apps.
Jabber, Inc was the first company that built itself around the Jabber server. It also moved quickly to trademark the word Jabber. Of course, this had various levels of response, from "how dare they???" to "that's cool, they've contributed enough."
Sound familiar? ;)
But Jabber, Inc has been very helpful in giving back to the community and they've also pushed the system very hard. There's a lot of antagonism between smaller companies trying to work in the Jabber community and Jabber, Inc, which is seen as trying to co-opt everything. It's a problem every free and/or open source community faces, and one that always gets pretty testy.
Anyway, Jabber is different because it's not clear what the hell it is. For some it's an IM technology, for others it's an XML transport protocol and for others it's all of this stuff combined. There are some really top notch Jabber hackers doing interesting things, and there are also a huge number of script kiddies.
So while it may not seem that there's a lot of development, it's probably just a low signal-to-noise. Also, it's a result of people using Jabber to do everything under the sun.
Jabber is a cool tech, though, and worth keeping an eye on.
talli
