mICQ is a free text-based ICQ instant messaging application that runs on a wide variety of platforms, including AmigaOS, BeOS, Windows either using Cygwin or MinGW, OS X, NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, the Sharp Zaurus and of course Linux and most commercial Unices including Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
mICQ has many of the features the official client has. Due to its command line interface, it has a good usability for blind users through text-to-speech interfaces or Braille devices. It is leading in its support for sending and receiving acknowledged and non-acknowledged unicode encoded messages (it even understands UTF-8 messages for message types the ICQ protocol does not use them for) and its support for client detection (which once was pirated by SIM/Kopete). It is also capable of running several UINs at the same time.
mICQ is licensed under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License. Versions prior to micq 0.4.8 were released by Matt D. Smith into the public domain; however, not much of the original code remains. All later additions were by Rüdiger Kuhlmann, in particular the support for the current ICQ v8 protocol.
