• Why do we need another instant messaging application for GNOME ?

Galaxium originated in 2003, in a time Pidgin (At the time it was still called Gaim) had very limited capabilities. All this time, Pidgin has been very slow to adopt new features.

Galaxium was created to better reflect the needs of the users, it is based on the philosophy that every protocol should be able to use all of it's features, instead of finding their common ground.

• Why did you choose to write completely new protocol libraries when you could have used libpurple?

We like to have complete control over our protocol libraries. One could argue that we can simply contribute to libpurple, but we are mostly a group of C# developers. We simply like C# and the many advantages it brings to the project.

• Why did you choose to write completely new protocol libraries when you could have used telepathy?

Telepathy is a piece of technology that many have a love-hate relationship with. In theory the concept is nice, but it practice it lacks a lot of the building blocks needed to write a decent instant messaging application. The lack of a unified framework and programming language make it very difficult to contribute to existing connection managers.

• Why does Galaxium use the Mono framework?

Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET API, based on the specifications published by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association). It's a mature and well tested framework which allows us to develop at a faster pace while still maintaining a very high code quality.

Also, Galaxium is designed to support several GUI frontends, which allows developers who are using Windows or Mac to create a native GUI. This could potentially allow a very big group of C# developers to contribute to Galaxium.