Re:Signal Foundation
by Fnoord on Thursday February 22, 2018 @12:42PM
(#16439464)
Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) and its subproject libpurple is the one to thank for. Telepathy [1] and Bitlbee [2] are based on that. I used all of these throughout the '00s. Before the Nokia N900, I used a Nokia E71 with Nimbuzz (basically proprietary but it runs something like Bitlbee under the hood on their servers).
Some of these protocols are open, some are reverse engineered. Problem with the current generation is that they're focussed much more on security features such as E2EE. Although before GAIM, we had other applications which did multiple protocols we also had loads of single purpose applications for all these protocols you mentioned and a whole lot more. Back in the end of '90s if you wanted to run MSN and ICQ and AIM on Windows, you had to use a client for each of these. Its basically a cat and mouse game. Look at the history of the Skype support for an example of that.
Some of these protocols are open, some are reverse engineered. Problem with the current generation is that they're focussed much more on security features such as E2EE. Although before GAIM, we had other applications which did multiple protocols we also had loads of single purpose applications for all these protocols you mentioned and a whole lot more. Back in the end of '90s if you wanted to run MSN and ICQ and AIM on Windows, you had to use a client for each of these. Its basically a cat and mouse game. Look at the history of the Skype support for an example of that.
[1] https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/
[2] https://www.bitlbee.org