Indian helps make seamless instant messaging possible

Universal instant messaging means you never have to worry about which IM client your buddies use. While proprietary products like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger would like to lock you in, the free software alternative—ayttm—wants to set you free. FREDERICK NORONHA takes a look at ayttm and finds out what motivates its geographically dispersed developers

PHILIP TELLIS says it feels good to use the products you develop, and even better to see others use them

It’s going to be easier to chat with your friends, in any part of the globe, thanks to a free software solution called ayttm (pronounced ‘item’), written by a loose collaboration of developers from France, India and elsewhere around the world.

Philip Tellis, the young Indian technologist involved in the project, says, "To me, ayttm is a fun toy that lets me talk to my friends (anywhere via the Internet) without having to care whether they use MSN, Yahoo, AOL or anything else. I also see ayttm as a collaborative tool."

The Mumbai-based techie and free software advocate says the new software would "treat a person as a person" and not cause compatibility problems that block communications between Internet chat enthusiasts using different platforms like MSN or Yahoo or AOL.

"Even hour shifts don’t count, as we never sleep," says project lead Colin Leroy of France, when asked about the difficulties of working in such loose networks across continents, involving people who have often not even met one another.

Seamless integration
Tellis, in his twenties and with the Mumbai-based National Centre for Software Technology (now merged into the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, CDAC), is enthusiastic in promoting free software in his spare time. He says the biggest difference between ayttm and other instant messaging (IM) clients is the way it handles integration between different services. Initially, the lack of integration meant those using, say, Yahoo Messenger, could only talk to others using the same IM, and so on.

"Official clients still don’t offer integration across different services. Other IM clients that do support integration treat your contacts as separate accounts on separate services," says Tellis. "We prefer to treat a person as, well, a person. You shouldn’t have to care about whether someone is using MSN or Yahoo or AOL, in order to chat with her or him. Furthermore, if one of the services fails, ayttm will automatically fall-back to the next available one."

He admits though that when compared to Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and Yahoo’s Yahoo Messenger, ayttm does lag behind in some areas. For instance, it does not offer native voice and video-based chats yet. But recently, additional functionality in the form of support for Yahoo webcams and MSN voice chat via NetMeeting/gnomemeeting has been added in.

Everybody’s buddy
Ayttm (ayttm.sourceforge. net), like other projects from the free software world, which allow techies to modify and improve on each other’s code, inherited some of its features from an earlier program called ‘Everybuddy’.

Free software chatting products—often running on the GNU/Linux platform, a small but impressive alternative to the proprietary Microsoft Windows — include Gaim and Every-buddy.

"Everybuddy made a lot of friends in its relatively short life, and passed away late last year leaving behind two children: Ayttm, and eb-lite—the new Everybuddy," says Tellis.

In January this year, Tellis joined overseas coders who have been working on Ayttm since December 2002. Prior to that, he was the Yahoo maintainer for the Everybuddy project since March 2002.

"It’s hard to say how many people actually contributed to Ayttm, and that’s generally true with all FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open-Source Software) projects. We’ve inherited code from Everybuddy. Colin, Andy, Yann and I are the primary developers, with Tahir doing a lot of documentation. Edward is the Windows porter of the team," says Tellis.

Motivation
When asked what his motivation in contributing to the product is, Tellis explains: "Why I work on it? I’ll answer that in the words of one of my friends, ‘It feels good to be able to use the products you develop’. It feels even better to see other people use them. It gives me a chance to work on a new and exciting technology, and I get to really exercise my hacking skills."

Some of ayttm’s future plans include greater stability, cleaner code, voice and video functionality, and even encrypted chat for currently sceptical companies to begin trusting chat options via the Net. In fact encrypted chat functionality using gpg is almost ready to be incorporated into the product.

Says Tellis: "I started using Everybuddy in October 2001—before that I used to be an IRC [Internet Relay Chat] geek. I used the Yahoo module the most, and found that there wasn’t anyone maintaining it, so took it upon myself to fix any bugs that I found. Rob Lazzurs, the maintainer of Everybuddy, added me as a full-time developer in March 2002, and I’ve been working on Everybuddy/ayttm since then."

"We’ve received patches from a whole list of people. We’ve also got to credit our beta testers who really take the product to its limits, and our users who tell us what they’d like to see in it. Everyone’s contributed to making ayttm what it is," says Tellis.

Dispersed development
Working across continents and cultures isn’t difficult. "The only adjustment we’ve ever had to make is to maintain our ChangeLog in GMT [Greenwich Mean Time]. We’ve not had cross-cultural issues or language issues. I guess all hackers share the same culture. As far as being a distributed development team, that’s never been a problem, since we have all discussions on the mailing list, supplemented by ayttm conversations. Also, having at least one developer awake at any given time means coding and code reviews don’t stop," says Tellis.

Future plans depend on users’ goals for ayttm. Tellis says that from a developer’s point of view what they’re looking for is stable and clean code, more than anything else. But from a user’s point of view, voice and video would be good, and several users have requested for such features. Some have already been provided, in the form of Yahoo webcam support and NetMeeting style integration using gnomemeeting.

"Encrypted chat is another feature that we’re putting in. This would be great for companies that want to use IM for confidential communication. Although IM service providers may provide these features, not all companies are open to trusting them. We provide the source code for anyone to review and ensure that we’re not hiding any backdoors in there."