What is Gaim?
-Instant messenger program
-Written in C, uses GTK, runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.
-Open source

Who am I and Where Did I Come From?
-Mark from Raleigh
-Started working on Gaim in 2001?  Added server-stored buddy support for AIM
-Now I do various oscar stuff, away messages in tooltips, etc.  Fix bugs.  GUI
tweaks to follow the Gnome HIG closer.  Accessibility tweaks.

Where Are We?
-Gaim is pretty popular and reasonably stable
-Supports 7 or 8 different IM services
-Good feature set

Where Are We Going?
-Core/UI split
-Rendezvous :-)

Legal Issues?
-From my point of view, the major IM services don't seem to care about us
-AOL tried to block third party programs in 2001?  Was an attempt to block the
jabber oscar transport, not Gaim, specifically.
-Yahoo! has been changing their authentication protocol, not sure why
-MSN changed their protocol to require SSL.

Aren't the network protocols proprietary?
-OSCAR is, Yahoo! is?  MSN basically is
-Reverse engineered by capturing and analysing network traffic.  This is more
legal than decompiling an official executable

What's it like?
-Fun
-Lots of good experience.  Using gdb, memprof, etc.
-Waaaay too easy to flame people, you have to be careful...
-We basically code what we're interested in
-We're all pastey white guys