The draft Specification of IM engine Service Provider Interface[2] document from the Northeast Asia OSS Forum[3] Work Group 3 recommends bus-centric IM framework architectures with a bus implementation (similar to dbus).

Therefore, Huang Peng from Red Hat established the IBus project to prove the idea of IM-BUS by using Python, D-Bus and GLib rather than implementing the functions recommended by CJK OSS forum.

IBus became the new default input method framework in Fedora 11,[5] and replaced SCIM in Ubuntu 9.10.

It implements XIM protocol, and has GTK and Qt input method modules.

ibus-m17n is an IME that uses input methods and corresponding icons in the multinationalization database, abbreviated to the numeronym "m17n".