Open Source Gaim Project Gets Name Change

After a long silly legal battle with AOL, the Gaim project team has finally signed an settlement to end the standoff.

There is one catch, however - they have to change the project's name.

After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "Finch" for gaim-text. Yes, the spelling of "Pidgin" is intentional, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin.

Now with this issue behind them, they hope to release Pidgin version 2.0 within days.

I have been using Gaim for several years now and I love it. I am glad to hear that this issue is behind them and that they will be able to work a bit more freely (without the fear of legal troubles from AOL).