Instant Messaging On Linux

IceFox writes: "In this first installment of a four part series, LinuxOrbit takes a look at AOL Instant Messaging clients available for GNU/Linux. Kaim, Gaim, and the official AOL Linux client are reviewed. It's interesting to note that open source projects are way ahead of AOL in developing a full featured AIM client for GNU/Linux."

Comments

How about other UNIX builds?

[bjb]

You know, this just points out a nasty little trend that I see in the Linux development world- people who typically develop for Linux are blind to the fact that there are other UNIX systems out there. In particular, I'm bitching about the fact that Everybuddy and Gaim fail to build on Solaris systems simply because the code is written without regard to other systems.

You can say "Well, it says its for Linux" or "GNU isn't UNIX" or some other cop-out, but in reality with these types of programs it doesn't take a lot of effort at the design phase to make it cross (UNIX) platform and still perform just as well.

Before this gets knocked down for being flamebait, I just want to point out that I've identified fixes to 3 open source projects before to make them cross platform and the authors don't respond because "if it isn't linux, they don't care". I can understand if you don't have the hardware to test it on, but at least take a suggestion/patch.

<grumble grumble grumble>

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