Friday FOSS fest: Franz, RamBox, Pidgin and more

And lo, it was foretold, punter shall speak unto punter from a single app

Most modern chat systems are entirely proprietary: proprietary clients, talking proprietary protocols to proprietary servers. There's no need for this: there are free open standards for one-to-one and one-to-many comms for precisely this sort of system, and some venerable clients are still a lot more capable than you might remember....