The SIP Communicator started out as the JsPhone example in the NIST-SIP project. It then moved out to a life of its own as a separate project on java.net. At the time it was mostly doing audio/video calls through SIP and hence the name.

Near the end of 2005 the SIP Communicator was completely rearchitectured and a new OSGI based design was chosen so that plugins could be easily written for the project. The 1.0 release included a considerable effort of integrating new instant messaging and presence protocols such as Jabber, AIM/ICQ, and others.

Acknowledgment:
The SIP Communicator and JAIN SIP projets (though administratively separate) are still in close collaboration. You can find the JAIN SIP Reference Implementation (nist-sip-1.2) at http://jain-sip.dev.java.net.

The SIP Communicator was originally created by Emil Ivov who was at the time a student at the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France. Today the core team has grown and counts developers and contributors from all over the world. A complete list of those may be found in the Team and Contributors section.