Microsoft announced this more than a month ago, and today it happened: The MSN Messenger network has been closed to all clients using older protocol versions, so the wonderful free multi-protocol client Fire cannot connect to MSN anymore. Fire and other third-party clients will undoubtedly have support for the new protocol version soon (same as in a similar case with Yahoo Messenger recently), but the problem is not only this (rather trivial) technical issue: Microsoft now also requires third-party clients to acquire a license for using the network, potentially adding a more serious legal barrier.

Since I have to use MSN Messenger for work, I have no other choice now than to use the official Microsoft client, which of course does not support ICQ. And since I do not want to have two chat clients running all the time, I will probably not be online in ICQ a lot these days. If the Fire guys can make it work again, they are definitely in for some of my patent money (which so far went to the Perl Monks, Sourceforge, and JEdit).