Today is Gajim’s birthday! 🎉 Seventeen years of Instant Messaging with open standards and open source software.

About Gajim

On Mai 21th 2004, Asterix (Yann Leboulanger) released Gajim 0.1. Gajim (is) a Jabber Instant Messenger. Development started back when XEPs (XMPP Extension Protocols) were named JEPs (Jabber Enhancement Proposals) and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) was called JSF (Jabber Software Foundation). Right from the first year, Gajim was available for both Linux and Windows. Supported by many contributors, there have been more than 70 releases until today. The code repository counts around 18,000 commits, and the issue tracker (once powered by Trac, now Gitlab) lists a history of over 10,500 opened issues in total.

Today, Gajim supports around 85 XEPs. Driven by the community, Gajim has been translated into 29 languages. A calculated effort of around 31 person-years went into developing Gajim.

With the release of Gajim 1.0 in March 2018, a big switch from Python 2 and GTK 2 to Python 3 and GTK 3 had been completed. For the following releases, Gajim’s core had been gradually rewritten. Since February 2021, we’ve been working on the next version. It will include a complete rework of Gajim’s main component: the message window. lovetox (Philipp Hörist), current maintainer of Gajim, gave a first introduction to what’s coming with the next version:

This is only part of what we’re planning to do for the next release of Gajim. Stay tuned!

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.