Hello,
I'm Lennart Schellingerhout from the Netherlands, a computer sciene student. For a schoolproject I have to do a survey about a specific topic. The topic I chose is to survey the possibilities for an open source instant messenger with collaboration possibilities. As a target user base I chose the open source developpers community. This because I'm a big open source supporter and the use of instant messengers in the bussiness world isn't still not fully supported. I hope some of you can help me out by answering some of the questions below. The survey is not based on intentions to really develop an instant messenger with collaboration features, but it is as mentioned an project for school. So I hope some people won't be offended by thinking I could be somesort of competitor developper.

Here are the features of the instant messenger. This might be needed before answering some of the questions.
The features of the instant messenger with collaboration possibilities are: chatting, voip, video, whiteboard function, filesharing, desktop sharing, integration in a subversion system, advanced security (pgp), cooperatively working inside a document/code.


1)Which applications are you using, beside the ide's, when developping?

2)Which communication techniques (email, instant messaging, etc) are you using when developping?

3)Are you using a distributed instant messaging network or a network provided by one of the bigger instant messaging providers?
And which specific network are you using?

4)Are you using one of the features mentioned above in some other (communication)tools when you are developping? If yes, which of the features?

5)Would you use an open source instant messenger with the above mentioned features when you are developping?
(For instance when working together with some other developper on a solution, helping another developper with some problems, etc)


Thanks in advance for answering the questions! Your help will be very much appreciated!
Lennart Schellingerhout

Moved to Discussions & Opinions.

1) I use Konsole and Kate as my IDE, and usually run a web browser, Quassel, Psi, and Amarok.

2) I use Email and IRC for communication

3) I use the KDETalk network for Jabber ( with Psi ) and the Freenode network for IRC ( with Quassel )

4) Other than chat, I do not use any of the above mentioned features ( IRC is implictly group chat, I do not use any of Jabber's group chat abilities )

5) Both clients I use are open source software.