Digsby IM/Email/Social app for Windows to be open sourced

The developers of Digsby, an instant messaging, email and social networking application for Windows, have announced that they will be open sourcing the application. The application, built in Python, C and C++, is not being abandoned say the developers adding, "We will still continue to provide the vision and a centralized location to download an Official Digsby build", and offer auto-update updates and a installer. The delay in releasing the open source version appears to be, in part, because the code has to be modified to stop saving settings on the Digsby servers and keep the information locally.

Digsby offers instant messaging with a combined buddy list for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber and Facebook Chat, tabbed conversation windows, popup IMs when minimised and conversation logs. Email systems supported include Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail and POP and IMAP accounts. For social networking on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn, Digsby offers alerts of events and a "real time Newsfeed" of friends' status.

The company offers little detail on why it switched to open source. The company was acquired by Tagged, a social network, in April 2011 and, after migrating its servers to the US West Coast, the Digsby blog was silent until today's announcement. The code to be released will also include the first build scripts and other work done for a Mac and Linux version of the code, which "won't work out of the box", but should provide a starting point for developers "with a little work". Details on planned licensing are not available but the code will be shared in the Tagged GitHub repository.

(djwm)