We are both console lovers. But it is annoying to have a few tty's open with
chat things in them. IRC, ICQ, MSN, Jabber... For X there is Gaim, which
supports many chatprotocols. Why wasn't there such a thing for the console?

The idea to port Gaim was easily thought of, of course. But we liked our IRC
clients. And we used it the most, so we used it best. Importing it into the
IRC client was a nice idea. But what if someone liked a different client. Then
(s)he had to duplicate our work.

That's a shame, we thought. Doing work twice is pointless. So when Wilmer got
the ingenious thought in his mind while farming, to create an IRC to other
chatnetworks gateway, we were both so excited, that we started working on it
almost immediately. And the result is BitlBee.

This package comes with support for MSN, Jabber, Oscar and Yahoo, as well as
enabled flood protection.