Aaron Cayard-Roberts
Open Source Software Project
V2.0
V1.0
10-5-00
I've done some searching on the web in general and on sourceforge.net. For a while I didn't see anything that looked interesting to me (mostly because I don't use many Linux programs) until I saw gaim. This was a chatting program that I used when I was tiring out Linux for the first time on my own machine. I remembered that it was a little buggy but for the most part was a good program. Its based on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) which is on favorite windows based chatting program mostly because its not very complex and lots of people use it. The Linux version was smaller and had almost as many features. Since then AIM as gone through several version updates and has had many new features added to it, so it didn't surprise me to much that gaim also had the equivalent of these features. I was a little worried about picking something that was a pretty big program and had many aspects that I have never dealt with before (graphical interface, sounds, and internet connectivity). For these reasons I continued looking for a while but found nothing else that seemed to stick out at me as something that I would like to work on.
So I figured that if I was going to chose gaim I would need to install Linux so I could do testing on my own machine, and give me more incentive to fix the bugs...since I would have to be using it while running Linux. This turned into a completely different problem. I've installed Linux on this computer last year so I know it would work, but for some reason in the repartioning step it made my hard drive unreadable....which I finally fixed after 5 hours of playing around with it.
After not getting Linux running (which I haven't given up on) I decided I should look at the program to see what I was getting into. after downloading it and uncompressing it I found out that it was written is C which is a good thing since its the language I'm most comfortable with. I figure even if I'm unable to fix one of the larger bugs I can try and add a new feature to it (like storing the buddy list on the hard drive) and no mater what I would learn a lot about how a program like this works.
V2.0
10-10-00
I went out looking for some other Instant messenger programs on the web and tried some of them out. One of the more promising ones I tried was Jabber. It looked like a very well put together program, they had good doc on there website telling about how the program works and how it did different things which would make it easy to play around with the code. The really cool thing about it was that it lets you chat with Jabber users and AIM and/or ICQ users. This is a great thing for people that have friends that use AIM or ICQ but not both. The down side to this is that you have to login three different times in order to be able to chat to all three user pools and you have to have an account with AIM and ICQ. But one of the main reasons I didn't switch over to it was because Jabber requires lots of none standard libs which you have to install yourself and when they fault to install correctly its not very enlightening about whats why not, so I wasn't able to get past the configuring step. The other main reason I didn't go with Jabber is because AOL is talking about merging there AIM and ICQ user pools anyway, which makes the best part of Jabber useless.
Info on gaim
Gaim uses AOL's published protocol TOC which is very stable but doesn't have all the features that AIM's current protocol, Oscar. Gaim has a working reversed engineered version of Oscar which even though its not done yet already has many more options then TOC. There is an option that lets you choose which protocol you would like to use if Oscar is giving you problems. The government is also pressuring AOL to release their protocol and make it the standard because AIM is by far the most dominant IM being used right now.
The oldest files I found for Gaim were from 1998, but it was a german release so I'm not sure if it is older then that or not. Right now the maintainers are Rob Flynn (rflynn@blueridge.net) and the original author is Mark Spencer (markster@marko.net ). I'm tiring to contact Rob but he has been idle...I will confirm the dates and user base estimates when I do. The home page for gaim is http://www.marko.net/gaim .
I haven't really noticed any bugs so far, but there are several features that I would like to see added to gaim that aim has. One of them is a pop mail checker to monitor your mail. Another would be to allow the user to read other peoples away messages from the user information window instead of having to message them and see it pop up (which is something that AIM does). Something else I was thinking about was making an option so that the your buddy list is saved locally all the time instead of on the AIM servers were from time to time it gets deleted and you have to reload your buddy list from your exported file of your buddy list.