[Gaim-devel] *** Gaim is now known as Pidgin

[Tim R. <tim...@gm...>]

Many years ago when this project was first started, it was called "GTK+ AOL
Instant Messenger." AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the
name to "Gaim." AOL was appeased, and no one really ever heard of it because
there were very few users back then.

A few years later AOL trademarked "AIM," and started referring to their IM
services using that name. They complained. The issue was brought up on
Slashdot, and the Gaim developers at the time got some legal support. That
legal support advised that the ongoing discussions with AOL be kept
confidential until fully settled, and so it remained. The public thought the
issue had gone away then. It sorta did, in that AOL stopped responding to
Gaim's legal support for a while.

Our legal support has changed several times, and each group of lawyers have
recommended silence & secrecy. Around the time of Gaim's first 2.0.0 beta,
AOL came back into our lives in a very strong way, this time threatening to
sue Sean.

This represents a clear pattern. AOL received more pushback than they
expected, and would sort of let things stand for a while. Then they would
threaten a different Gaim developer. Each time a new Gaim developer was
threatened, we had to look at new legal support, to prevent a conflict of
interest.

This process could not go on forever. As a result we ended up forming the
Instant Messaging Freedom Corporation, and making it legally responsible for
Gaim. We also had our new legal support work to create a real settlement
with AOL that would get this issue dismissed from our lives forever.

Getting a settlement with AOL has taken FAR FAR longer than we would have
ever guessed. On legal advice, we have refrained from any non-beta release
during this process as a show of good faith, and to keep AOL from giving up
on it. Again, on legal advice, we have also kept this information closely
controlled.

At long last, I am pleased to announce that we have a signed settlement and
can release our new version. There is one catch however: we have had 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
.

Since so much is changing between the name and the nature of the
2.0.0release itself, we decided to go ahead with something we have
talked about
doing for a while now. We have set up our own server, kindly donated by
DVLabs. As a result our new home will be www.pidgin.im and
developer.pidgin.im We, at least for now, will still be using SF's mirroring
system for releases. However, the bug tracking will no longer be on SF, and
we will be migrating the mailing lists at some point soon. Also, we have
chosen to go with monotone for our revision control, rather than the SF cvs
or svn.

In the last week or so, an upgrade to SF's infrastructure caused an old
version of the gaim-cabal list to become briefly public. It has always been
our intention to end-of-life this list and make its archives public once the
settlement was signed. Fortunately, the legal process has concluded,
allowing us to make a formal announcement now, instead of months from now.

I, and all of pidgin's development team have deeply hated the need to keep
some portion of our work, decision making and discussion secret for a time.
I sincerely apologize that as a result of this need, you all have had no
chance to help us with it, and to provide feedback.

Now that the settlement is signed, we hope to have the final Pidgin
2.0.0release late this week or early next.

We are going to release it with a 2.0.0 version number, and an API
compatibility layer for plugin authors. The project has not changed; this is
our 2.0.0 release, not some new program that requires new version numbering.