November 2020, “Community Choice” Project of the Month – Pidgin IM

For our November “Community Choice” Project of the Month (based on August vote), the community elected Pidgin IM, a universal instant messaging (IM) program.

Pidgin IM lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously, and is compatible with several chat networks out of the box, including Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC and more.

We caught up with project maintainer and lead developer Gary Kramlich as he shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.

SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the Pidgin IM project please.
Gary Kramlich (GK): Pidgin is an instant message / chat application that allows you to connect to multiple different networks (like XMPP, Facebook, IRC) at once.

SF: What made you start this?
GK: Pidgin was originally started in 1998 under the name Gaim by Mark Spencer because he wanted an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client that worked on Linux.

SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
GK: Yes, many times over. While the AIM network has since been retired, Pidgin still continues to grow and adapt to other chat networks and protocols, while retaining its core vision of Linux support and simplicity.

SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
GK: Anyone that uses a chat application can benefit, but the biggest benefits are for people that use many networks; they can communicate with all their contacts in one place. People in memory-restricted devices (such as embedded devices) can also take advantage of Pidgin’s extremely low RAM use, compared to the original clients or web clients.

SF: What core need does Pidgin IM fulfill?
GK: It allows people to put all of the communication programs into a single, simple, low-memory program. It can also help vision-impaired users who are unable to use the web or standard client.

SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using Pidgin IM?
GK: Plugins, plugins, plugins! A lot of the current popular chat networks are supported via third party plugins. Plugins can be used to customize Pidgin’s behavior and looks in many ways. Our new plugins website is a great place to explore the hundreds of community-created additions to Pidgin– https://pidgin.im/plugins.

SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
GK: We try to make ourselves available wherever our users may be. That means we have an IRC channel on Freenode, a Twitter account, a Facebook account, an XMPP server, etc.

SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
GK: Yes, we often get a surge of user feedback and press coverage after each release. Unfortunately we haven’t been releasing as often as we’d like to, mostly due to the stability of the core and the lack of security issues.

SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
GK: Probably the first huge thing to happen to Pidgin (Gaim at the time) would be our 0.60 release. The team poured months into moving from GTK+ 1.x to GTK+ 2.0, as it was known at the time. Along the course of this migration, the codebase was split into “core” and “user interface” code far more than it previously had been, and we had an infusion of new developers that helped us build Windows support into our code. We were news in several prominent venues for what was the first time in most of our contributors’ memories. The Windows support made our user base grow exponentially and although that brought us a horde of new challenges, it also sparked new people to contribute via patches, plugins, etc.

SF: What helped make that happen?
GK: The dedication of all our contributors and beta testers.

SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
GK: SourceForge’s CVS and Subversion project hosting enabled us to collaborate as a team that at times reached over 20 developers with write access. The classic issue tracker gave us the ability to receive bug reports and feature requests from our users and use them to help shape our work on the project. The project web hosting gave us a home to house documentation, FAQ’s, etc. The notifications tied to the File Release System allowed news of a release to reach our users much more quickly than any other announcement we could make. Although we’ve moved on from those initial SourceForge offerings, we still make heavy use of the File Release System as we always have. Without the mirror network that SourceForge brings to the table, we wouldn’t be able to get our releases to the majority of our user base.

SF: What is the next big thing for Pidgin IM?
GK: Getting 3.0 out the door with a refreshed UI and GTK+3 support that’s able to support features in modern chat applications.

SF: How long do you think that will take?
GK: We really don’t have a way to know at this point. Work on 3.0.0 has been ongoing for over a decade, with various issues delaying the work. Any estimate we could guess at would almost certainly be woefully wrong.

SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
GK: Unfortunately, no, we don’t. Our lack of resources isn’t technological, it’s human. We simply don’t have enough active developers that know the codebase well enough to reach our goals. We could really use more developers.

SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Pidgin IM?
GK: Split more stuff out to dependencies earlier on, spend more time doing code review/writing unit tests.

SF: Is there anything else we should know?
GK: You can watch me live stream Pidgin development on https://twitch.tv/rw_grim

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