Recently Jamie Frater coder of Bersirc have sold the code and domain to a new owner. As one of the last popular freeware Windows based IRC clients users are in their right to be a bit wary of what is going to happen to their client. We interviewed N. Copeland, the new owner of the code, and asked him for the future plans for this client.
The current users of the client are naturally abit afraid of what is going to happen. What can you say against them?
I've noticed this fear too. Its caused by uncertainty. I can say nothing against them, but they should be releived. Its been about two years since the release of Bersirc 1.4. As far as I know, Bersirc 1.42 doesn't compile. Now they have positive assurance that another Bersirc will be released. Be happy!
Bersirc was one of the few remaining freeware IRC clients. What are the plans with Bersirc concerning this? Will it become a commercial product, or maybe crippleware?
Niether commercial or crippleware. Even better yet, it will be Free and Open software. New versions of Bersirc will very likely be distributed with the Qt Public License. Chances are that you may never see the old Bersirc source code.
Do I read it correctly then that Bersirc is going to be a opensource client?
Yes.
How do you see the (commercial-) market for IRC clients?
Commercial IRC clients are old news with the advent and popularity of Open Source software. Using the "the more it [any piece of open/free software] is used the better it gets" rule, Open Source clients get the fixes, features, and innovation users desire. For example, I've observed a boom in XChat users. This isn't a coincidence; I speculate the cause to be the Open Source development model.
The website have been replaced with a temporary notice, what are the plans for the website and domain?
The website will be maintained and hosted by Theo Julienne of http://www.free2code.net even though his CSS doesn't always validate. He will also be doing a lot of Bersirc development.
Talking about coding, can you elaborate a bit more on coming (new) features? Maybe you have other idea's you want to incorporate into the client?
I've made a list of things I'd like to see, and things I'd like to change that I saw in Bersirc 1.4. I'll publish some objectives on bersirc.com soon.
No comments have been made about the final price for the code and domain. Is there anything you can say about this?
Jamie asked me not to blab the price all over the Internet, but I can say it started with a $, ended in ".00" and was in U.S. currency.
Anything else you like to say?
Yeah. Development right now is internal only. There are no releases (but we have builds!) and there is no public access to code. We'll release a beta in an unknown quantity of time. Discussion happens in #bersirc on irc.free2code.net. My name is Nick and I go by TsTech; Theo goes by Terminal. I might even show you a sceenshot of what we call Bersirc 2.1. You see, Bersirc 2.0 was a developers build by Jamie Frater written in C++. So the new Bersirc is version 2.1 and is written in C++ using Qt. I feel that I owe you an exclusive screenshot. Coming soon...
Update 13 february: as promised, a screenshot:
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