4 years ago an IRC server written in perl was released on SourceForge called pircd. For those not familiar, pircd is an impressive piece of work with a modular design that's a joy to hack. There was some development and patches, a few alpha and beta versions, but the project has apparently stalled. If a few monks get busy on this project we can all look forward to the day when chanserv.pm, nickserv.pm and more grace the catacombs <g>.

Here's something the lead developer said last summer:

> I dunno, are there competent people out there interested in taking pircd
> to the next level? Does anybody care?

I'm of the opinion that people don't really care. (I'm also of the opinion that free software isn't the amazing development model everyone claims it is. But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

Sure pircd is a neat little toy, but it seems to be one that noone cares to help improve it. I do appreciate the emails I've gotten over the years from people who have used it successfully, but I appreciate the maybe one or two worthwhile patches I've received more than the lot of compliments.

As far as I'm concerned, pircd development is more or less halted unless I, or someone else has a revelation.

If someone would like to pick up development, be my guest. I'll hand over administrator privileges on the sourceforge project when I see a well written patch worthy of a new version number in and of itself.

From http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1846230