Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has an XMPP client. JMP’s tagline, “Freedom For Your Phone Number”, captures the freedom that JMP gives you from traditional cell phone carriers, as well as the fully-free nature of all the software that powers JMP (licensed entirely under AGPLv3+).

Today is JMP’s 3 year anniversary! That’s right, we launched JMP exactly 3 years ago, and have been chipping away at Big Telecom ever since. 😉 We’ve got a fair bit planned for the next 3 years, and are excited to bring it all to you as it’s ready.

Before we go into those details, we wanted to let you know about a couple of excellent events coming up next month that JMP is involved in. Here they are:

• LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition! This is a new conference in 2020, which will be happening concurrently with the US LibrePlanet conference in Boston, May 14-15. From the website: “For the first time ever, all the great presentations of LibrePlanet are coming to Canada! Bringing in the main talks via live stream, with space for local hallway track and more, LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition is your chance to meet with like-minded participants and take in the event from Canada.” It’s happening at the Delta Hotel in Waterloo, Ontario. JMP is an official sponsor of LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition - more on that in a bit. Also, you’ll be able to chat with some JMP people in person, including core contributor Stephen Paul Weber!
• LibrePlanet in Boston! The original LibrePlanet continues for its 12th year, this time at the Back Bay Events Center. Check out some wonderful speakers and booths at this excellent conference devoted to software freedom. JMP is very likely to be included in LibrePlanet’s raffle and/or door prizes so be sure to keep an eye out for those!

As for development work, we’ve got a number of projects on the go. Behind the scenes we’ve been updating our code to use a completely new API from our carrier, which will be mostly invisible to users, but does have some cool new features we hope to be alpha testing with some of you soon. In particular, we’re excited to be rolling out group texting (both sending and receiving) in the coming months! If you’d like to alpha test, please just reply to this email and let us know - we’ll set you up in the next month or so.

And along the lines of new features, we’ve also been improving our payment system at the same time. As part of our sponsorship agreement with them, we’re currently running payments for LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition through our new payment provider, which will let us do credit card subscriptions directly without needing PayPal (still some development work to do there, but let us know if you’d like to alpha test the new provider for your next payment). And we’re also automating the currently-manual process we have for accepting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Stay tuned!

If you’d like to know what’s happening with JMP between emails like this, here are some ways you can find out:

• find us in xmpp:discuss@conference.soprani.ca?join - a group chat accessible from most XMPP clients, and on the web
• signup for the 30-day free trial at https://jmp.chat/#signup and try it out!

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend! We’re looking forward to many more years of JMP and hope that you are too!