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Gaim Renamed — Now Pidgin IM
An anonymous reader writes "Announced on the Gaim mailing lists earlier today, the Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM. Development is being migrated off of sourceforge.net as well and is now being hosted on developer.pidgin.im"
I used to really love Gaim. But other messengers have begun to really surpass it.
Part of this apparently is due to legal problems with Gaim which no doubt discouraged the developers. Part of it is Google hiring the lead developer to jump ship and focus primarily on Google Talk.
However, it is time we had one universal standard for messages. You can have different clients with different features, however, users should have a universal address so you can message anyone from any network from any client.
Anyone recall separate independent email systems before one unified email standard?
I hope this new project begins full steam, but a big part of me is sad that between projects like Kopete, Gaim, Trillian, Miranda, etc. that we're dividing efforts instead of having one truly incredible messenger that works across all networks, supports all the features of each network (including full voice and video).
I'd gladly pay money for it. I'm sure many would. Then again, if we had a universal standard for messaging, everyone (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo) could keep their clients, and everyone's networks would grow instantly, and we wouldn't even necessarily have to devote so much developer time to keeping networks so private, and trying to reverse engineer network standards.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
To which I completely agree. It's about the fifth story I've read today on slashdot and other sources about intellectual property and licensing and copyright. And god, is ever saddening to see such a massive amount of resources and time and energy spent on those issues, rather than everything else that should be done.
Of course, then I have a cynical moment and think here I am writing a comment about a story about an IM client's name change, rather than rather really changing what matters in the world, like disease. It's these kind of moments when I wonder about why we do what we do.
There is no such thing as "Intellectual Property". It is propaganda. There are copyrights, patents, and trademarks. They are very different from each other. Anyone using the term "Intellectual Property" to group the three of them is either confused or is trying to mislead others.
Watch This speech by Richard Stallman. Warning: it's 2 hours.
I'm of the opinion that the original 14 year copyright term was reasonable. Anything more is overkill (well, heck, let's bump it to 15 just to be nice). Seriously... if you can't extract enough value out of an original creative work in 15 years to make it worth your while, the work's probably not that good in the first place. After that, let it go back to the public. Copyright is supposed to be a concession to the reality that not all work can be service-oriented, not a license to completely replace goods and services with ideas in gigantic sectors of our economy.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I suppose we should have seen it coming when Lindows lost to Windows.
Except they didn't
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns