GAIM becomes Pidgin IM

Filed under: Internet

GAIM becomes Pidgin IM

by Brad Linder Apr 8th 2007

After a long and drawn out legal dispute with AOL over its name, the developers of the open-source instant messenger client GAIM have agreed to change the program's name.

The program, which allows users to send and receive message with AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and other IM services, began its life as GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger. AOL wasn't too happy with that, and the developers changed the name to AIM. After AOL trademarked the name AIM, GAIM heard from this blog's parent company again.

Thus the new name, Pidgin IM. The project is also moving from Sourceforge, and has a new developer page. The settlement also means that a non-beta version of Pidgin IM could be on its way soon.

[via Slashdot]

Tags: aol, gaim, pidgin im, PidginIm

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Brandon said 7:33AM on 4-09-2007

Pidgin, lol.

Great, just great.

Sneaker said 8:13PM on 4-09-2007

I always thought Gaim was a dumb name. But now that they had an excuse to change it.. who would have thought they would pick a worse name.

phoenix said 7:46PM on 4-10-2007

I love the folks who think it's a silly name. The name has its own meaning that's actually very fitting for an IM client:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

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