Like most netizens, IM is one of my primary methods of communication... and has been for many years. And like a good number of you I also have multiple IM accounts, AOL AIM, Google Talk, MSN Windows Live Messenger, etc... and one of the biggest pains of using multiple IM accounts/protocols is having to use multiple IM clients.

Those in the know (like myself) have been using a great free (as in speech and beer) IM client to consolidate all of their accounts into a single IM client. That magical client's name? Gaim - well at least it used to be.

Gaim is now Pidgin

An announcement on the Gaim Pidgin homepage explains that some long running legal issues with AOL have finally been resolved. The biggest change coming out of the settlement is a name change for the Gaim project.

...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.

Legal issues can easily kill what is otherwise a great OSS project as funding is usually lacking at best. One of the best moves the project team made was to form a business entity and make legally responsible for Gaim. Lack of such an entity can open individual developers up to law suits by those poaching on the good will of your project.

Looking forward

At any rate, now that the legal whoa's are over, the team can finally push v2.0 out the door - albeit under a new name. At any rate, I'm looking forward to getting the RTM version of my favorite IM client.

Good luck Pidgin team, and thanks for all of the hard work!