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Testimonial
I love this app. Keep up the great work!
Credit
Thanks to Jaden for the original design of this site. The colors and organization remain, though the code has been completely rewritten.
About Fire
Fire is a multi-protocol internet Instant Messaging client based on freely available libraries for each service. It is released under the GNU GPL. All services are built off of GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libicq2000, libmsn, jabber, and libyahoo2 (Linux libraries).
Fire can handle similtaneous connections to AIM®, ICQ®, Yahoo!®, IRC, MSN® and Jabber.
Fire is not affiliated with AOL-Time Warner, Microsoft or Yahoo!®.
The Real History
Now for the real reason you came to this site... The history of Fire.
How it all began...
It all started with Norman, the lonely caveman, who was cold, wet, and wanted someone to talk to.
No Wait! it was Eric, the early Mac OS X user.
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 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.
What's in a name
Now for what to call this new creation????
The answer came as a bolt of inspiration:
What comes after "AIM"?
"FIRE!!!!!"
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 1.0. Initially Eric hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He formed the corporation "Epicware" (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 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 hardware, and finally decided to move the project to sourceforge 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.