Why are there no public downloads available yet?

A public release will be made as soon as Quassel is in a state where the development team feels confident enough to present it to a wider audience. This requires some more work in particular on the GUI and on providing an easy way of doing basic configuration.
We would like to release a version that can actually be used and tested in the real world, rather than a version that turns people away since it's so rudimentary :-)

Another issue is that we still break the internal arch, datastructures, but also data formats and database schemas on a regular basis, not always being able to provide a migration path. This means that people using Quassel IRC already need to get rid of their configuration, stored backlog and so on, which is something we do not want to have in public releases.

But rest assured, we will open up the development process, including nifty features like SVN access and whatnot, and also publish binaries and packages for various platforms in due time, probably early 2008.