On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME. From there, I contributed a few more patches, then a lot more, then I re-wrote the protocol backend (to use the newer protocol) and before you knew it, I was the co-maintainer. The original author left, another maintainer joined, then left, and, in 2004, I was left as the only active maintainer. Then I lost interest and became the unmaintainer. I haven’t made a release since 2007, or written any code to justify one, so with GNOME 3 coming up, and after many years of non-maintenance, I have to admit the truth, GnomeICU, as a project, has died many years ago.
There were some changes left in the git tree, along with many translation updates, so I made a last release, for anyone who cares. To my surprise, we still get between 50 and 150 downloads per month from Sourceforge, hopefully it will be useful to some.
It was a fun project, I spent countless nights having fun programming, and I hope other did too. I learned a lot about programming, communities, etc. But more importantly, I’ve met some amazing people like Vincent Untz (rumor is that I committed his first patch to a GNOME project), Seb Bacher and even Philippe Kalaf.
30 March 2011 à 3:00 am
GnomeICU was my first and unique ICQ client on Linux. When I moved to Jabber I stop using it, but it served me *A LOT* in that time. Now, we have clients like Empathy which probably are better suited for this propietary protocols. So, thank you for all the hard work!!
30 March 2011 à 3:49 am
And that would be my patch to GnomeICU:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnomeicu/commit/?id=1b49dde8e82b8bb32f2232af510fef1da81eaeb8
30 March 2011 à 4:06 am
Ah, those were the days… 🙂 It was a fun project, and it’ll be in our memories forever!
30 March 2011 à 4:38 am
I have fond memories of using GnomeICU – so thanks for the hacking.
30 March 2011 à 10:41 pm
As one of the past co-maintainer, it was fun and thanks for keeping it alive for so long!
ICQ was one of the first “social network” so to speak, but I guess it is time to move on to something better. Let’s hope our path will cross once again.