ØMQ was created to address the need for cheaper and more efficient connectivity between distributed systems as hardware capabilities increased. It is an intelligent socket library that provides various connection patterns for messaging between processes. ØMQ aims to be fast, small, multiplatform, and multilingual. It uses common patterns like request-reply and publish-subscribe to allow processes to communicate simply and efficiently over in-process, inter-process, and network connections. The ØMQ community continues to enhance and support the open source library.