Jive Software will stop sponsoring IgniteRealtime hosting

Hello all,

Jive Software has expressed their intention to stop the sponsoring of the hosting of this community. What will be discontinued specifically is all of the Contegix-based hosting, which includes the servers that run the igniterealtime.org website, our Atlassian stack (Bamboo, JIRA), our XMPP domain, and related tooling. The forum functionality that you’re using to read this message is based on the Jive cloud, which is different from the Contegix-based hosting. Jive Software has expressed that we’re welcome to continue to make use the Jive cloud-based solution.

I’m sad to see Jive pull out. After they established the community back in 2006, they have put in a lot of effort to establish this community. On top of that, they’ve been incredibly generous in regards to spending money on development and hosting (looking for suitable replacement for the hosting of this community made me more aware of exactly how generous, wow)! Over time, Jive’s business moved away from XMPP and Instant Messaging. Most of our contacts within the company have also moved on by now, which resulted in where we are today - pretty much distinct entities. It’s no wonder that Jive re-evaluated their support. I’m grateful for all of the support that we received from them in the past. Jive is also actively working to end our cooperation well, offering support and even donation of the existing hardware. Kudos.

We’ve had some discussions in the open_chat MUC room, of which this post attempts to be a summary-to-date. Also, to allow this community to continue, there are some steps that we need to take, and others that we could consider. Although a few of us discussed them, this post is an open invitation to others to pitch in.

We roughly discussed three subjects:

  1. Finding a new home for the community.
  2. Creating a legal entity to represent the community.
  3. Improving and/or replacing functionality provided through this website.

I strongly suggest that, until we have completed the move away from Jive, do not actively pursue the latter. Although we can make a lot of improvements to this site and the tooling that’s available to us, doing that now will slow down the things the are non-optional. I fear that the related discussion alone would take away much of the focus. Let’s first settle in a new home by going for a pragmatic one-on-one migration, before we start changing things.

To keep the various discussions on topic, I’ll create separate discussion threads for the remaining subjects. Please follow the corresponding links that I’ll add momentarily to join in on the subject. I’d welcome any and all feedback that you have!

On 3. we don’t have to change it from the grounds for now. As i probably won’t be able to participate in new hosting and tooling building (though, maybe i can), i already thought about doing some updates of information on the website here and there. This is minor, won’t hurt or take much time and we still have website’s source on GitHub, so it won’t disappear suddenly. I will watch closely all the discussion and contribute where possible. And thanks to Guus for coordinating all of this

As i understand they let us use Jive-X (or we have to pay for it?)? If so, then at least we have one headache less and indeed generous for them

I agree wroot. I wasn’t referring to simple updates with number 3 - but more along the lines of switching away from lets say Jira, or Jive Cloud. I know it’s being discussed, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t - but we shouldn’t do that now.

Jive primarily wants out of the hosting contracts, so, none of this has any bearing on the Jive Cloud forum/community site. Ignite Realtime is free to continue use of the Jive Cloud instance.

I know that some in our community don’t like Jive forums. Well, personally i think there is a lot for Jive to improve here. But migrating forums would be additional pain in the neck in the current situation (and additional load on the hosting). But we should definitely think about it in the future (once everything else migrated), so we won’t have similar situation again, if they decide to cut forums too.

JIRA is ok by me