| It's inevitable people will reverse | engineer the client, as was done with MSN, | Y! Messenger, and AOL That's not the end-all be-all though. I remember

| It's inevitable people will reverse | engineer the client, as was done with MSN, | Y! Messenger, and AOL That's not the end-all be-all though. I remember that AOL was pretty aggressive about keeping unauthorized clients off of their Oscar protocol (the original protocol was 'toc,' IIRC and didn't support all of the 'advanced' features like Buddy Icons, idle times, etc). At one point, AOL's servers would require random chunks of the official AOL IM client's binary as a protection measure. Obviously you can get around this, but it's not something you can do out in the open (distributing AOL IM with, say, Pidgin/libpurple would be copyright infringement).