OpenIM and IMFreedom

Few months ago I wrote a bug report on the freedesktop.org bugzilla to ask for means to start a new project. The goal of that project, called “OpenIM” was to gather effort on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols. In the bug thread and on the pidgin mailing list, a discussion started to determine if freedesktop was the right place to host that kind of project (i.e. support reverse engineering and documentation of proprietary protocols) and a lot of people joined it, agreeing that such an effort was needed, regarding the poor and all over the place documentation parcels (at least referring to the MSN protocol ones). Those people included valuable guys from amsn, pidgin, pymsn, jabber, and other worthy individuals of the IM field.

Instead of freedesktop, the pidgin guys proposed to host the initiative on IMFreedom, a Foundation they did setup as a façade when they got justice problems with AOL. We all agreed that using IMFreedom for OpenIM would make more sense. That gave birth to a brand new wiki to collect our efforts.

Be interested, sweat, contribute!

an OpenIM proposal

I finally wrote a freedesktop.org project request for the OpenIM thing that Ali and I (and certainly lots of other people involved in IM protocols reverse engineering) would like to see come up. The request is a bug report on freedesktop bugzilla, please bring your observations and ideas! Here is quoted the text of the proposal :

This is about a new project that I would like to see come up under the fd.o banner.

I’m part of the pymsn project. Our goal is to provide a full implementation of the latest MSN Messenger protocol for interoperability purpose. So far the project is kind of hosted by Telepathy since it’s the base library for telepathy-butterfly but this is clearly not the place where it should be.

Based on that observation, we would like to build an OpenIM initiative. Such a project would aim to the gathering of people working on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols.

One of the most important goal in this would to have centralized shared documentation on protocols and a clear follow up of features implemented in each project.