Empathy (software)

Original author(s)Xavier Claessens
Developer(s)Guillaume Desmottes, Xavier Claessens
Final release
3.12.14[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 26 August 2017
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemBSD, Linux, Other Unix-like
Available inMultilingual
TypeInstant messaging client
LicenseGPL-2.0-or-later
Websitewiki.gnome.org/Attic/Empathy

Empathy was an instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) client which supported text, voice, video, file transfers, and inter-application communication over various IM communication protocols.

Empathy was created by forking the Gossip project started by Michael Hallendal, Richard Hult and later maintained by Martyn Russell. It was forked because there were disagreements amongst contributors about the backend at the time. It was initially completely XMPP based (similar to Google Talk and Facebook's chat implementations), but others wanted it to use the Telepathy stack. This led to the forking and new name Empathy.

Empathy also provides a collection of reusable graphical user interface widgets for developing instant messaging clients[2] for the GNOME desktop. It is written as extension to the Telepathy framework, for connecting to different instant messaging networks with a unified user interface.

Empathy has been included in the GNOME desktop since its version 2.24,[3][4] in Ubuntu since version 9.10 (Karmic Koala), and in Fedora since version 12 (Constantine); Empathy has replaced Pidgin as their default messenger application.

Empathy is no longer under development by the GNOME team.[5]

  1. ^ "Empathy 3.12.14". Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  2. ^ Ryan, Paul (25 August 2007). "Empathy toolkit simplifies instant messaging integration". Ars Technica. Retrieved 20 March 2010.
  3. ^ Paul, Ryan (20 March 2009). "Hands-on: GNOME 2.26 brings incremental improvements". Ars Technica. Retrieved 20 March 2010.
  4. ^ "GNOME 2.24 Release Notes". The GNOME Project. Retrieved 2011-07-18.
  5. ^ "Apps/Empathy - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Retrieved 2019-11-12.