GAIM Goes to Pidgin

Years of legal wrangling between AOL and the open source instant messenger GAIM has resulted in a settlement forcing GAIM to change its name. Enter Pidgin.

GAIM has provided support for AOL’s AIM protocol in an open source client. But AOL never liked the fact that GAIM includes “AIM” in its name and has finally emerged successful in its effort to get the project renamed.

Open Source wunderkind Mark Spencer, who is perhaps better known as the leader of the Asterisk open source VoIP effort, originally called GAIM GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger. In response to criticism and legal challenges from AOL, Spencer changed the name to GAIM.

But over the years GAIM has grown from supporting just AIM to now being a multi-headed IM client supporting Live Messenger Service (a.k.a. MSN and .NET Messenger Service), Yahoo Messenger, Jabber and Google Talk (XMPP) and IRC among numerous other IM protocols. GAIM has also become a component of nearly every Linux distribution.

Full article: internetnews.com