BitlBee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BitlBee is an IRC instant messaging gateway licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It communicates with the end-user via the IRC protocol whilst interacting with popular chat networks such as AIM and ICQ (both via OSCAR), Windows Live, Yahoo! and Jabber. The users' buddies appear as normal IRC users in a channel and conversations use the private message facility of IRC.
Although it is possible to run BitlBee on your own computer, there are many servers available for public use. [1]
BitlBee runs on many operating systems including Linux, Unix, BSD, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS.
[edit] History
The idea for BitlBee was forged at the 24th of June, in 2002 by Wilmer van der Gaast, it remains unknown when the first lines of code were written.
In early stages of development, BitlBee was more or less a semi-fork of Pidgin (known as Gaim at that time), only for IRC clients. As of lately, the application only still has a similar API to that of Pidgin.
