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Fire is the first instant messenger client for Mac OS X (previously for OPENSTEP), that can access IRC, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger. All services are built off of GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libfaim, libicq2000, libmsn, jabber, and libyahoo2 (Linux libraries).
Fire is released under the GNU_GPL, the most recent version is 1.5 as of Tuesday, Jan 4th, 2005.
How it all Began
Back in the early beta days of Mac OS X, Eric Peyton wanted to have an IM client which would run on this new OS from Apple. Of course, all of the official client vendors had not done anything to support Mac OS X, so Eric started expanding on an OpenStep project he had been working on, which used an open source library to connect with AIM servers. He started porting this using the new Cocoa libraries on OS X and a new IM client began to take shape.
The One Man Show
Development in those early days was fast and furious, and Fire was touted by Apple as one of the keystone applications on Mac OS X 10.0. Initially Eric hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He formed the corporation "Epicware" (http://www.epicware.com) to protect himself from the lawyers of the huge corporations he was interacting with.
The application was expanded to include the ability to talk to multiple servers. First Yahoo! Messenger and ICQ were added, followed later by IRC, MSN, and Jabber.
Getting Some Help
In 2001, Colter Reed started contributing to the development of Fire on a regular basis, and became the second major developer of Fire. They collaborated for a while using the Epicware (http://www.epicware.com) hardware, and finally decided to move the project to sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net) to take advantage of the free hosting, download, and mirror services available there. Version 0.28.a was the first release which used the SourceForge System.
See also
External link
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