The news entry “Tasmanian devils have 300 pounds per square inch of bite” gave me lots of hope:

Google Summer of Code [brings to us support] for Apple’s Bonjour protocol, UPnP NAT traversal, AIM and ICQ file transfer proxying, and support for the SIP/SIMPLE protocol are a few of the additions.
[..]
You can expect Gaim [..] to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.
[..]
On a related note, the gaim-vv project—which aimed to offer a framework for voice and video support in Gaim—is being merged back into Gaim proper for hopeful incorporation into Gaim 2.0.0. This will be used to support Google Talk’s voice as well as MSN and Yahoo! webcams.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Especially that last sentence:

[Code merged in from Gaim-vv] will be used to support Google Talk’s voice as well as MSN and Yahoo! webcams.

Huh. That’s interesting, since one of the (former) Gaim-vv developers, Peter ‘bleeter’ Lawler, begs to differ.

Sean’s code specifically ignores [previously suggested code from Gaim-vv] to the point of replacing gaim-vv’s generic API calls with specific voice calls.

sounds quite different to Sean’s claim of

[Gaim-vv code] will be used to support Google Talk’s voice as well as MSN and Yahoo! webcams.

Peter:

My 2c bet. No video for gaim 2.x, voice only on google (if then). Gaim won’t be called gaim anymore, and more people leave the project. [..] Now I’m 100% convinced that starting a new IM program from the ground up, with proper roadmaps, project leadership etc. is the way to go.

If his claims have truth to them, this is certainly unfortunate for Adium, my favorite IM client. I already knew things were moving slowly regarding splitting Gaim’s front-end from the back-end “Libgaim” library project that Adium uses, although I’m not sure if that’s still the case. I was not, however, aware that there were further major management problems. Hopefully, the Gaim team gets their act together (with or without Google), or Adium quickly (yeah right ) finds (or builds) an alternative messaging framework.

Update: More from Peter:

And would you believe it, not 12 hours since I’ve left the gaim project, and they’ve come back to me looking for patches.

Update 2: Christian ‘ChipX86′ Hammond chimes in.

It’s sad, yet so familiar… [..] I don’t know what Gaim’s future holds, but in the past year I’ve learned not to care. My work on Gaim has helped me to establish connections in the open source community, and for that I am grateful. It has also helped me to get a job that I absolutely love. I’ll forever miss the project as it used to be, and hope someday it’ll reach that stage again.

Update 3: “part trois”:

Yes, I’m annoyed. But at least I’m trying to comprehend what the fuck is going on. However, it’s pretty hard when the project lead refuses to discuss things because he sees it as some kind of argument.

Update 4: OSnews reports the story and also points to a post of Seans’s, who, in a nutshell, claims that gaim-vv never had much of an audio implementation to begin with, nor one for sending (as opposed to receiving) video. I cannot test either side of the story, but as far as I can tell, Sean is now implying that Gaim 2.0 won’t have video capabilities whatsoever, and the upcoming audio implementation, while full-duplex, appears limited to Google Talk, or “Jabber”, as he says. Since Jabber itself defines no audio support that I know of, and iChat has a different, incompatible audio implementation, this in effect means that Gaim will be able to talk to Google Talk, and only Google Talk (well, and Gaim itself, presumably). A step in the right direction, sure, but why am I supposed to like it that a company like Google now essentially appears in charge of what features have priority and what features might as well get canned?

Update 5: One more entry from Peter

Thanks to some wonderful feedback from the community and some conciliatory tones from a couple of gaim developers, I’ve reached the conclusion I’m merely hurting the community more by refusing to continue work on voice and video for gaim.