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Mark Spencer, author of the well-known GAIM instant messaging client, wrote the following account of how large, lawyer-laden AOL is dealing with software projects with names similar to its AIM service. Trouble is that (among other things) AIM wasn't registered as a trademark when GAIM appeared. Does anyone believe that the two are "confusingly similar"? It reminds me of Parker Brothers objecting to clue.com -- is the Air Force next? Update: 06/25 10:53 PM by T : Russell Balch of Akridge & Balch will be representing the GAIM project; if you're interested in helping the GAIM authors in this legal fight, Mark writes: "We've set up an account on paypal ("paypal@linux-support.net") for contributions. Left over money or all of it if we can't get enough to pay for the letter will be refunded as much as possible through paypal."

Well, AOL is at it again. In 1998, I wrote a program called GAIM which provided Linux users with a way to participate in AOL's Instant Messenger (tm) service. GAIM is one of the best examples of Open Source software in action, because even though I have not personally coded on it in years, momentum as continued through multiple maintainers to make it one of the best instant messaging programs available. From its humble beginnings as a two-week long project I started to teach myself GTK programming, to today where it is included in virtually ever Linux distribution, FreeBSD, and others, it has shown how even highly non-technical software can benefit from the Open Source model. We even receive numerous requests to port it to windows, because people like it more than the native AIM client in windows.

In July of 1999, I received a letter from AOL's Legal Representation requesting that we remove their AOL trademark and logo from our web site and product name, which we promptly did. Now, in 2001, the same firm has sent us notice requiring that we change the name of the product (that they clearly have known for almost 2 years) because they believe GAIM's name to be confusingly similar to the AIM trademark that they applied for in 2000, almost two years after gaim was released. We have until June 29, 2001 to prepare a response to their charges. Similar notices have been sent to the owners of the "AIMY," "KAIM," "wmGAIM," "TAIM," "phpaim," "blaim," "libfaim," "jaim," "eaim," and "maim" projects.

We have consulted with an attorney who believes we stand on a strong foot for the following reasons:

• "gaim" and others are not confusingly similar to "aim."
• Since AOL has been aware of our name for over two years and has not expressed any concern at the use of "aim" in the name of the product even while expressing concern over their AOL trademark and logo, they may have implicitly given us license to use it.
• AOL's trademark was filed for nearly two years after GAIM was first released. Unlike patents, it is sometimes permissible, however, to pursue a trademark since "first commercial use."

We are nearly out of options at this point, however, for the gaim project. We either will have to have some legal defense for gaim and the other projects, or will be obliged to change names.

If anyone out there is a lawyer, and is willing to take on this project to support these projects, please contact us by sending e-mail to gaimdefense@marko.net. We have a lawyer who is willing to do the requisit trademark research and send a letter for $500, so if you feel strongly enough that you are willing to contribute money to the project, please contact us and let us know that too.

Unfortunately, in the legal world, it's not just sufficient to be right, you have to have the finances, determination and other resources to fight the battle. There is always a balance tha requires picking and choosing the battles so important that you are willing fight, and those that you choose do not wish to spend resources defending. The question is, do the 40,000+ gaim users out there believe strongly enough that the defense of the "gaim" name is an important battle to fight.

IceFox writes: "In this first installment of a four part series, LinuxOrbit takes a look at AOL Instant Messaging clients available for GNU/Linux. Kaim, Gaim, and the official AOL Linux client are reviewed. It's interesting to note that open source projects are way ahead of AOL in developing a full featured AIM client for GNU/Linux."

topdown writes "I just noticed that AOL released Instant Messenger Beta for Linux (rpm format for RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake). Don't know about you, but I'll be sticking with gaim for now." Wow, this is fantastic news. Way to be on the cutting edge, AOL. Sorry, but this release doesn't even warrant a copy of our home game. I still don't forgive you for using the Jetsons theme music in your commercials.

Mark Spencer wrote in to say that since the AOL vs. Microsoft fiasco has begun, the GAIM team has been told they aren't allowed to use the AOL logo and other various terms in their documentation (with certain exceptions), so they have put out a request for new logo in the form of a contest. This comes after AOL has been blocking Microsoft from letting its MSN users send messages to users of its AIM service, and right before IBM unveils messaging software of their own, though that looks to be very business-oriented, as opposed to Joe Random Netuser-oriented.

Mark Spencer wrote in to say that since the AOL vs. Microsoft fiasco has begun, the GAIM team has been told they aren't allowed to use the AOL logo and other various terms in their documentation (with certain exceptions), so they have put out a request for new logo in the form of a contest. This comes after AOL has been blocking Microsoft from letting its MSN users send messages to users of its AIM service, and right before IBM unveils messaging software of their own, though that looks to be very business-oriented, as opposed to Joe Random Netuser-oriented.

Gopal Sarma asks: "Hi, I am a relatively new linux user, and recently a friend called me asking me if I knew of any Windows alternatives, because he is sick of it. I naturally recomended Linux, but I have a problem. He uses AOL's Instant Messenger, and I can't seem to find any clones on Linux. I found gaim, but i don't know how stable it is. Does anyone have any ideas?"

Our favorite company has been having difficulties remembering what they innovated (ever) lately. So much so, that on the one hand they claim Linux is a competitor (built by a single individual...) and on the other don't see Linux as a threat because no company owns it. (This last statement was not made by Microsoft itself, but probably reflects what they believe. However, even if Linux were to dominate the PC market, they would still be a dominant force: webTV and Dreamcast are two very effective means of dominating the market of those who would like to access the internet (and want to play games) while not having the money to buy a complete PC. WinCE targets both the above and many PDAs, while Embedded NT will attack markets such as hospital equipment (adding new meaning to the phrase "Oh my God!") and network routers. True, Linux ports may be attempted to some of these platforms, but if they cannot run the games, who will use them?) Now we need only wait until Monday for the fun and games to begin. However students at the Auburn University have already started to have their fun. Read on below. shaldannon writes "Mark showed up a Microsoft recruiting agent tonight in front of an audience of 200+. The Auburn University chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery hosted a meeting for its membership at which Microsoft recruiters spoke on the subject of 'why Microsoft is the place to work.'

Mark, an easy-going guy who also runs the Linux Support Services site, showed up in his green penguin shirt. As the meeting progressed, the recruiter, named Colleen, asked eight volunteers to come forward to help her demonstrate the composition and duties of a Microsoft product team.

I nudged Mark, and we both headed to the front to participate. A half dozen Linux users in the room began to nudge each other and grin when they saw Mark's shirt, which has a quote by the great Linus on the back. The recruiter asked for someone with vision to step forward, to represent the "Project Leader." Mark was the natural choice--because his vision is Linux--but she was totally oblivious to this.

The meeting progressed, with the recruiter going through the various positions in a software team while some of the Linux users in the back (John, in particular) passed notes around explaining the irony of the situation to the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, she asked where we thought Microsoft got ideas for its products. From on stage, behind her, Mark piped up with "from other companies!" She turned and observed, "Someone in here is a smartass," not realizing that Mark was flaunting the greatest challenge to Microsoft, right on his chest--the happy penguin."

Thanks also to Cowering In Fear, ColonelPanic, and Dan Kegel for some of the material used here.

Our favorite company has been having difficulties remembering what they innovated (ever) lately. So much so, that on the one hand they claim Linux is a competitor (built by a single individual...) and on the other don't see Linux as a threat because no company owns it. (This last statement was not made by Microsoft itself, but probably reflects what they believe. However, even if Linux were to dominate the PC market, they would still be a dominant force: webTV and Dreamcast are two very effective means of dominating the market of those who would like to access the internet (and want to play games) while not having the money to buy a complete PC. WinCE targets both the above and many PDAs, while Embedded NT will attack markets such as hospital equipment (adding new meaning to the phrase "Oh my God!") and network routers. True, Linux ports may be attempted to some of these platforms, but if they cannot run the games, who will use them?) Now we need only wait until Monday for the fun and games to begin. However students at the Auburn University have already started to have their fun. Read on below. shaldannon writes "Mark showed up a Microsoft recruiting agent tonight in front of an audience of 200+. The Auburn University chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery hosted a meeting for its membership at which Microsoft recruiters spoke on the subject of 'why Microsoft is the place to work.'

Mark, an easy-going guy who also runs the Linux Support Services site, showed up in his green penguin shirt. As the meeting progressed, the recruiter, named Colleen, asked eight volunteers to come forward to help her demonstrate the composition and duties of a Microsoft product team.

I nudged Mark, and we both headed to the front to participate. A half dozen Linux users in the room began to nudge each other and grin when they saw Mark's shirt, which has a quote by the great Linus on the back. The recruiter asked for someone with vision to step forward, to represent the "Project Leader." Mark was the natural choice--because his vision is Linux--but she was totally oblivious to this.

The meeting progressed, with the recruiter going through the various positions in a software team while some of the Linux users in the back (John, in particular) passed notes around explaining the irony of the situation to the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, she asked where we thought Microsoft got ideas for its products. From on stage, behind her, Mark piped up with "from other companies!" She turned and observed, "Someone in here is a smartass," not realizing that Mark was flaunting the greatest challenge to Microsoft, right on his chest--the happy penguin."

Thanks also to Cowering In Fear, ColonelPanic, and Dan Kegel for some of the material used here.

David Patton writes "Other World Computing has an online installation guide for LinuxPPC R4 on a G3. It's pretty good, and covers most anything a Mac user needs to know to install Linux. "

Mark Spencer writes "The Open Group has changed the license for X11R6.4 back to the previous free license of before. This is a big win for free software certainly, and it's good to know that the potential split between the XFree86 and X11R6 distributions will no longer be necessary. "

Mark Spencer writes "While on a vacation in Turkey, I happened by a magazine stand and saw the Turkish magazine CHIP for August or September (couldn't tell, since it was dark) had the "HIT" Slackware 3.5 on CD with it. Turkey not only has its own users' group but even it's own distribution, Turkuaz. So, now in addition to delicious Turkish coffee, sensual Turkish baths, there is indeed Turkish linux. "

John Hartnup sent us a Perl Script for tracking stuff that happens at Distributed.net. Speaking of Which, Slashdot has broken into the top 10 overall! Keep it going folks! Next, Matthew Kirkwood sent us a link to link to another linux support site. Third, Jesse Off sent us a link to another one of those silly You know you're a nerd when. Mostly Unix jokes. Pretty good. Next, Jason Poll sent us a link to a collection of online books, the site includes programming and Linux books apparently. Continuing along, David Sinck sent us a link to one of those James Bond super cars with fancy video doo dads. This one has instructions to build your own if you have tons of cash to drop on all sorts of strange hardware. It's really pretty cool. Lastly, Harry McKee sent us a link to an article about a Telepathic Clapper. Hopefully they can come up with an ad campaign less obnoxious than 'Clap On/Clap Off'

Mark Spencer writes "The microcontroller-linux group has released a kernel patch against 2.0.33 and made kits available, including the xcopilot emulator so you can try it out even if you don't have a PalmPilot or microcontroller handy. If you are interested, check out their FTP site or their web site uClinux runs on motorola microcontrollers based on the 68k processor. The Palm Pilot is currently used as the development platform. "

Carlie Fairchild sent us a link to SSC's Open Systems Products Directory . Next, Sean Leach sent us a link to A PlanetQuake/Linux Article. Third Joe Pranevich sent us a link to his Linux Q&A site. He's collecting FAQs to provide a database of helpful information for Linux Users. He's seeking anyone interested in helping. Finally we have another Linux help site sent in by Jason James. This site is seeking folks willing to help field technical questions for users.

Hey it's friday guys! And that means I'm scouring clean the submissions box off a bunch of stuff thats cool enough to share, but for one reason or another (Enough articles posted, or maybe I'm just lazy :) haven't gone up quite yet. Hit the link below to share the fun.

I've also got assorted Slashdot Source details for anyone who is interested in that sorta stuff.

First off, Moses Moore sent us the Meta perl generator. You can check it out here if you're curious. Basically with this code, you can hack together your own generator script (Like my movie generator, or the recently posted Slashdot news article generator). It's spiffy.

Next Mark Spencer sent us a link to hisLinux support site . It's extremely under construction, but he's looking for help to make it way cool.

Allright Slashdot stuff. It's been a busy day. We were getting way more hits than usual this morning. The cron job that handles the site updates used to run every 60 seconds, but with the increased load, it needs to do more, and on a busier system. So I moved it to 2 minutes. Today we just moved it to 5 to make sure- when 2 of those things run at once, I've got big problems :)

So now its a daemon. It runs in the background, idling until called into action to update the homepage and articles. Yippee!

The Q&A section is Under Construction. I'm really looking for a Sharp person to spear head it. It's going to basically be a subsection of Slashdot (like the book reviews and the features sections) that's going to concentrate on asking a couple of questions (probably mostly on Linux, but certainly other topics are valid). The idea is that with the huge number of experienced computerphiles in the audience, we can help the huge number of newbies *grin*. So if you have questions (no questions are Stupid!) send 'em in. I really think this could be fun, as well as allowing us to help people get up to speed. I hope to have varying levels of difficulty to keep the gurus out there on their toes too.

And now the Slashdot Source Code stuff. As you hardcore readers already know, you can finger or Dave to figure out the TODO list on Slashdots code. And both of those lists are getting shorter. We're very close to being ready to try a first test site. If you're interested in being the first, drop us a note. (You better either have a really cool idea for a site, or be willing to pay us because we've had a lot of inquiries and can only pick a couple- don't worry, when the code comes out, everyone will have free reign to do what they desire).

Anyway, here is a list of the major stuff left to cover before the source release:

Topic Editor

Cleaning up Cookie stuff

Standard Functions for various display thingees (Stories, Comments Etc. Those will be the only functions that source code users will really need to modify

Make sure it'll work without mod_perl for those who don't wanna screw with it, and aren't going to be getting 100,000 hits a day on a P133.

So anyway, we're gonna work real hard on those things tonight and tomorrow, so don't be to surprised if you see some scary error messages. Perhaps another week of misc. coding- then we need a test site. And it should be ready a week later. Dave and I both have a major project going on at the office these days though, so our time is a little short, but hopefully things will get done quick enough anyway.

Hey it's friday guys! And that means I'm scouring clean the submissions box off a bunch of stuff thats cool enough to share, but for one reason or another (Enough articles posted, or maybe I'm just lazy :) haven't gone up quite yet. Hit the link below to share the fun.

I've also got assorted Slashdot Source details for anyone who is interested in that sorta stuff.

First off, Moses Moore sent us the Meta perl generator. You can check it out here if you're curious. Basically with this code, you can hack together your own generator script (Like my movie generator, or the recently posted Slashdot news article generator). It's spiffy.

Next Mark Spencer sent us a link to hisLinux support site . It's extremely under construction, but he's looking for help to make it way cool.

Allright Slashdot stuff. It's been a busy day. We were getting way more hits than usual this morning. The cron job that handles the site updates used to run every 60 seconds, but with the increased load, it needs to do more, and on a busier system. So I moved it to 2 minutes. Today we just moved it to 5 to make sure- when 2 of those things run at once, I've got big problems :)

So now its a daemon. It runs in the background, idling until called into action to update the homepage and articles. Yippee!

The Q&A section is Under Construction. I'm really looking for a Sharp person to spear head it. It's going to basically be a subsection of Slashdot (like the book reviews and the features sections) that's going to concentrate on asking a couple of questions (probably mostly on Linux, but certainly other topics are valid). The idea is that with the huge number of experienced computerphiles in the audience, we can help the huge number of newbies *grin*. So if you have questions (no questions are Stupid!) send 'em in. I really think this could be fun, as well as allowing us to help people get up to speed. I hope to have varying levels of difficulty to keep the gurus out there on their toes too.

And now the Slashdot Source Code stuff. As you hardcore readers already know, you can finger or Dave to figure out the TODO list on Slashdots code. And both of those lists are getting shorter. We're very close to being ready to try a first test site. If you're interested in being the first, drop us a note. (You better either have a really cool idea for a site, or be willing to pay us because we've had a lot of inquiries and can only pick a couple- don't worry, when the code comes out, everyone will have free reign to do what they desire).

Anyway, here is a list of the major stuff left to cover before the source release:

Topic Editor

Cleaning up Cookie stuff

Standard Functions for various display thingees (Stories, Comments Etc. Those will be the only functions that source code users will really need to modify

Make sure it'll work without mod_perl for those who don't wanna screw with it, and aren't going to be getting 100,000 hits a day on a P133.

So anyway, we're gonna work real hard on those things tonight and tomorrow, so don't be to surprised if you see some scary error messages. Perhaps another week of misc. coding- then we need a test site. And it should be ready a week later. Dave and I both have a major project going on at the office these days though, so our time is a little short, but hopefully things will get done quick enough anyway.

Mark Spencer writes "Just so you all know, I am hosting a lotus-linux mailing list to discuss the possibility of running Lotus Notes/Domino under Linux. We have discussed both running SCO and Solaris/x86 binaries, as well as strategies for encouraging Lotus to make a port. We have a contact at lotus and that contact has mentioned that he has been in communication with a representative from RedHat to discuss the possibility. If you're interested, send "subscribe" in the body of a message to lotus-linux-request@marko.net to join the list. We hope to setup a web site soon to collect information regarding the possible markets of such a port. "