Empathy is an instant messaging and voice over IPclient which supports 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, but others wanted it to use the Telepathy stack. This led to the forking and new name Empathy. Empathy also provides a collection of reusablegraphical user interfacewidgets for developing instant messaging clients 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, in Ubuntu since version 9.10, and in Fedora since version 12 ; Empathy has replaced Pidgin as their default messenger application. Empathy is no longer under development by the GNOME team.
Ryan Paul at Ars Technica wrote in March 2009, "Empathy's highly modular design, basic video chat capabilities, and excellent support for desktop integration are all major assets." He stated that it had "improved", but it was "rough around the edges", noting that at the time it had not yet "been included in any major Linux distribution" citing an Ubuntu usability study. In November 2009, after Empathy replaced Pidgin in Ubuntu 9.10, Ryan wrote: "Although Empathy has improved a lot over the past year, it's still not stable. It crashed quite a few times during my tests and exhibited a number of other minor bugs. It's adequate for basic chatting…". In his extended review of Ubuntu 9.10, Igor Ljubunčić was terse about the switch from Pidgin to Empathy: "Personally, I see no value in the change, especially since Empathy supports less networks." Tom's Hardware reviewer Adam Overa referred to the switch to the "much less popular and compatible Empathy client", as "robably the most controversial change in Ubuntu 9.10", noting that a "firestorm of debate has been raging over this topic among developers and users alike ever since the announcement to replace Pidgin was made…" in 2009. In 2010, Empathy was listed as one of "5 open source VoIP softphones to watch" by Rodney Gedda of Computerworld magazine.
Security
Unlike clients supporting Off-the-Record Messaging, Empathy lacks privacy and security facilities enforced through technical means. Empathy's developers do not consider it within the client's scope to implement OTR, while leaving the possibility of supporting potential future protocol-level encryption standards open.
