AIM, now open source
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The AIM developers are over thrilled by this recent announcement: “Today is a historic day at AOL as we announced, just moments ago, a software development kit for AOL Instant Messenger.” That means one thing: AIM, on the key softwares of the Internet service provider, is going open source. Wow!
Inevitably called Open AIM, the open source software will now be modified and/or improved by anyone in the world. In the future, if the AIM team manage to play as good and fair as the Mozilla project ― which is also a AOL spin-off ―, a community of hard-core coders could help them launch some cross-platform versions for the Linux platform, Mac or Windows Mobile devices.
So far, the development kit (available here) is written using COM. So plugins and custom clients have to be written in C++, C#, JavaScript or Visual Basic computer languages.
The AOL turnaround, even if it could look surprising, may be part of the AOL CEO Jonathan Miller’s plan to keep the software still sexy. A couple of weeks ago, he unveiled the roadmap for the next version of AIM, featuring video and voice conversations, as well as claiming using some “secret” tactics to tame competitors softwares. Opening the code is not very original, especially now when every one except Microsoft does it, but at least the move could both lower some heavy development costs by outsourcing them and spark some social popularity after that AOL has loosed some prestige by taxing email sending.
What software do you like to become open source? ICQ? MSN messenger? Oh wait, forget the last one, it’s like believing in Santa Claus…
Mar 7, 2006 | By Nuno
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