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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"
IM-speak is a lot like a pidgin language.
I for one welcome our new pigeon overlords.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Tomorrow's headlines:
"AOL Instant Messenger changes name to Idgin"
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Ixnay on the amenay angechay!
Wikipedia knows
Once again, useful time and resources wasted on IP issues.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I've been playing around with the 2.0 tree of Gaim for a while now, and now that the legal issues are fixed, it'll be nice to finally see a stable release version of Gaim with a reasonable feature set. I don't care what it's called.
/. crowd.
Also, AOL needs to go off and die. The previous sentence is nothing but pandering to the
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Please let this be a Joke thats a terrible name.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
The emphasis is mine, with relation to the project's aims in their name selection.
I think it's a good name, if a little weird to think of after years and years of gaim.
Yes.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
this should have been posted on april first.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
Very sure.
AOL gives away their services for free right now, mimicing Yahoo and Google, trying to get by on having a large network of users they can direct targeted advertisements at.
If people opt not to use AOL products and services, AOL loses money.
If the project has an obscure name, people are more likely to never hear of it, or pass it over.
GAIM sounds like an AIM replacement.
I nominate that we all say a big fuck you to AOL and forever refer to Pidgin as the Program Formerly Known as Gaim.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It seems reasonable that if your product is Product Sucks and you offer Product Sucks Messenger (PSM) and somebody else comes out with something that works like your product, only better and names it GNPSM (GPSM's Not PSM) then you'd have a reasonable complaint. It seems odd to me that this wasn't voluntarily changed years ago.
I personally have used both products and wouldn't use the "official" AOL client if I had any choice and in fact have never personally installed it on my computers. I've had the misfortune of using computers that had it foisted on them but sometimes its hard to convince people to switch when they already have something they "know how to use."
I'm sure the new name has wide approval and it's too late for suggestions, but I wish they'd gone with "Nonsucky Chat Client" instead.
I know it is coming so I'll head it off, yes your client is better for whatever reason you claim. Yes, I've used IRSSI, Zinc, XChat, Mozilla's whatever it was called and others. I like the client formerly known as Gaim because it was always easy to set up and easy to use and easy to explain.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Pidgin _is_ a noun.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T569Z8t8ZA0
God Fucking Damnit
Looking at the comments so far it would appear the only thing keeping this from being a perfect name is ignorance...
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
After all that hoohah with Apple's "pods", Google and whatnot I think most of us have already been wondering at some point why Gaim is still keeping that name, especially since AOL isn't well-known as a conglomerate that plays well with this community... At least Gaim, the name, has had a good long run.
:/
That being said, *Pidgin*? *LibPurple*? That sure sounds... odd. I wished they took up the chance to pick a really good name worthy of one of the best long-time open-source projects around. Now we have to face on onslaught of bird jokes the next time we're sincerely recommending instant messaging software to Linux newcomers.
The disgusting legal issues notwithstanding, I have to say I'm very pleased with the change! I really hate all the cryptic acronyms so popular in the free software world. "Gaim," especially, was awkward and ugly. Pronounced like "game", is it? "Pidgin" is a terrific name. It immediately implies what the software does, and rolls nicely off the tongue. I'm also *really* happy with 2beta6 -- it was exactly what I needed to let me leave Windows, where I was dependent on Trillian for far too long. Pidgin supported Unicode correctly, which I needed, and there's a handy plugin that lets me read all my eight years worth of Trillian logs. I'm a very happy Ubuntu user now. As long as I have the stage: I'm sorry that the Pidgin team had to endure AOL's despicable treatment. Big kudos to them for sticking through and listening to their lawyers. I feel like they "took the bullet" for a lot of us who use free software and believe that engineering achievements should be accessible to anyone, period. Y'all deserve a nice big hug for your service and commitment to the free software world.
PIGOWNED!
"a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
Not if they called it a stenchblossom.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
You can't change the world on an empty stomach, or something like that anyway.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Do they think this is some kind of GAIM?
A pidgin language is one that's a mixture of other languages, often used in places colonized by other nations or in places were extensive trade makes contact between speakers of two languages common.
Seriously, you didn't know that?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's not Pigeon - it's 'Pidgin', which refers to a number of English-derived dialects spoken in Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. The language is simple in construction and has a very limited vocabulary, but it can be quite poetic.
I speak Bislama, the Vanuatu version of the language, which contains elements of French as well as English. The syntax is very much like English (subject - verb - object), but its idiom is derived from the hundreds of local languages.
I don't know whether the team were aware of this when they chose the name, but Bislama and the other South Pacific Pidgins are spelled phonetically, which makes it really easy to understand. Example:
Mi wantem toktok long yu Means "I (me) want to talk to you."
This phonetic spelling makes it absolutely ideal for texting, because there are few if any of the crazy English spellings that stretch on forever without adding anything to the word - 'thought', for example, is simplified to 'ting'. When SMS was recently introduced into Vanuatu, even expat folks like myself found ourselves texting in Bislama, because it's more concise.
So with all that in mind, I'll simply say, "Mi ting se 'pidgin' hemi wan gudfala nem blong givim long kaen software olsem. Smol tingting blong mi nomo.'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
does this mean it'll add, "Yah" at the end of all of my IMs?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Oh, I know that, intimately. I'm not advocating we abandon Copyright,IP or anything. I just wish that less time would be spent on it, and more time on the development that leads to that IP and copyright.
Seriously, Gaim was a terrible name. Nothing against homosexuals, but Gaim -> Gay IM?
Your comment betrays antipathy toward homosexuality because you bring it up as a reason for a "terrible name." Regardless of your patronizing "tolerance," the complaint you imagine is meaningless because if you're hearing "Gaim" as "gaym" then should also hear "gamers" as "gaymers." I'm betting dollars to donuts you would never advance the argument that gamers is a "terrible" word, whatever you say about having "Nothing against homosexuals."
blog
...I immediately thought of Voltron instead of a bird. Doh.
BytesTemplar.com
And am I the only one who pronounced it as "bitchin' IM"?
:/- spoon(_).
This is yet another reason AOL sucks. Their software sucks, their user support sucks, their users (with a few exceptions) and now their legal department sucks. Seriously, what the hell is the point of doing this, and why do it NOW, after Gaim's been around so long?
I do have to agree with the person who said #gaim is a hellhole though. I came in to ask a question about a segfaulting beta, got asked what distro I was using, replied "Gentoo," and was instantly kickbanned. The reason? "We don't like your kind here." And I'm not one of those ricing idiots who uses insane CFLAGS either. Now if only someone would write a simple GTK-based IM client, I would happily drop Gaim off by the side of the ditch like a hitchhiker with a massive case of BO.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
"Pidgin" is actually an adjective describing a simplified combining of languages, not a specific language family. There are pidgin languages spoken all over the world combining many languages, not always English. Many pidgin languages are named some variation of "Pidgin" but they don't have exclusive claim to the title.
More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
This is not saying that the developers don't want people hacking on Pidgin. There are currently plans in place to implement a Subversion gateway so that casual hackers can pull the Pidgin source and create their patches and whatnot. The reason behind the switch to monotone is that a distributed version control system fits more in line with the core developers' workflow, working on things separate from the main line for weeks and sometimes months before pushing to the public version control in order to minimize breakage and other issues. Take for example the planned moving of libpurple to using GObjects internally. This is a project I hope to assist with, and much of the work will likely be done privately in a local monotone database, then pushed periodically into a dedicated branch and merged for Pidgin 3.0.0 when the time is right. Between pushes, however, we have the freedom to break stuff as much as we want, then go and fix it whenever we want without having to worry about breaking things for other developers and users.
As far as plugins go, good for you that you had revived a plugin. Yes, the core crowd is a bit condescending and irritable, but realize the crap that we see in #gaim--all we ask is that people read the damn documentation and the channel topic. However, if you're making an honest development effort, we will assist you if we are able. For the most part, however, Pidgin is extremely well-documented for development, and what documentation lacks, other plugin code can often be used as an example (I have done this more times than I can count in the development of my own plugins). This abundance of documentation and examples means we expect you to do a little work for yourself, which seems to be a problem for the majority of visitors to #gaim.
For the record, I will note that I am a channel regular and have been for over three years. I am not officially affiliated with the project, but I have contributed in the past. I just happen to share some of the opinions of some of the developers and more involved contributors.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Don't you mean "I prefer pidgin"? *sigh* What good is a name if no one can get it right?
slashdot broke my sig
For whatever reason, among young American males, "gay" means "bad", much like "sucks" (as in "sucks dick") has passed from offensive slang into quasi-respectable common use to also mean "bad".
I can't think of another case where the name of a demographic group has been made into a common slang term with negative connotations. Some people use "to Jew" as a verb, but that's relatively rare. About the closest I can think of is "to gyp"-- i.e. to swindle like a Gypsy allegedly would.
But neither "to Jew" nor "to Gyp" have even close to the penetration (ha ha-- no pun intended) of the nearly-universal use of "sucks" to mean "bad" and the very common use of "gay" to mean "bad" (or "I didn't like it").
Imagine if people used the word "black" to mean "bad". And not just as in "black-hearted", but as in "Man, that play was so black", or "This pizza is black". Can you imagine the outrage? But nobody seems to care that "gay" is commonly used as an expression of disgust.
This is just another example of the deep-rooted homophobia of modern American culture.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Morons 1 - Dumbasses 0
Yay!
(pwned)
I vote we do it by switching to Jabber/XMPP.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
Yes, it's sad. That's why I quit giving AOL my money.
The facts laid out by the Gaim developers were:
What a bunch of assholes, but I suppose that's what runs Time Warner. "Ass on Line" sounds like a good name for them.
Lessons learned:
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Did the contract also specify that they use the dumbest possible name instead? Honestly. Shoulda called it Chazwozzer IM.
The distinction is actually fairly straightforward: pidgins have a very limited syntax with a fixed word order. A pidgin is seldom a "first" language: it becomes a creole, not in a few generations, but in the first generation in which it is taught as a first language. There is a level of syntactic complexity that is "innate" to anyone's first language: it was the quick developments of creoles from pidgins that was the main evidence for that observation.
There are "creole" languages which did not arise from a pidgin language, however. An example is Michif or Metis which is an amalgam of Plains Cree and French. Another is Mednyj Aleut, which is a mix of Russian and Aleut. To differentiate them from the pidgin-creole continuum they are often called "mixed" languages instead.
The reasons why mixed languages arise are somewhat different from the reasons for the development of creole languages, but the former have been and are still called "creole" in some publications.
All well and good.
But the brave and ever-faithful "carrier" pigeon has been in service for over 800 years - and has done his duty in countless cartoons, war movies, spy thrillers, martial arts epics. He had a memorable cameo in Grim Fandango.
It's the perfect logo for an IM, easily understood, easily pronouced - though just as easily mispelled - one that doesn't need the long-winded explanation that is so typical of open source.
They should change the name to something that sounds like the previous name. and just let'm do their worst. GAIM hasn't caused any "damages" and I think they'd be hard pressed to really come up with anything that even sounds good to a judge. Taking out the "A" should be enough.
Pidgin is not a specific dialect such as the one you cite. The wiki that you link even says that it is a somewhat generic term.
You spelled "pigeon" wrong.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Yeah, that will show em!
You make some interesting points but... You go off on an obscenity-filled rant that negates your stance to the extreme.
So far you've been modded up a bit but I expect this will drop down. If you had taken a few minutes and actually constructed an intelligent reply without so many expletives I would bet your comment would be modded to +5 insightful, instead it's likely to float between Insightful and Flamebait resulting in neutral karma.
If you really want to make a point, lay off the cursing. It just doesn't work unless, like Dennis Miller, you offset them with really large and obscure words and/or references that makes everything think you're reasonably intelligent instead of just being a whiny a douchebag.
You will catch more flies with honey than you will by calling them "freeloading jerkoffs" wishing they would "die in a fire and of anal rape" in addition to "ass cancer."
Seriously, who modded this crap as insightful?
I'm off to meta-moderate now.
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
Sure, but those aren't creoles. Like you said, they're mixed languages. That some people refer to them as creoles is more sloppy terminology than anything else.
Did anyone else think of carrier pigeons when they saw the name--as in passing messages between people? Apparently the pronunciation is the same.
PIMP???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
But they're not talking about copyrights. They're talking about trademarks. You think any company with an enforceable brand should be forced to abandon that brand on account of arbitrary expiration dates? Twinings, the British tea company, has had an enforceable trademark on their logo for 300 years. Nobody really has legitimate grounds to suggest that's not an appropriate thing.
(FWIW, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the issue of copyright... but let's not go getting ourselves confused).
What I'm really tired of is all the bad names in the FOSS world. "Pidgin" sounds terrible.
"enforceable trademark on their logo for 300 years"
Apologies. I should say their logo dates back 300 years -- they do still have a trademark on it, although I do not know when the trademark was acquired by them. Suffice it to say that having a trademark on such things in perpetuity (at least as long as you have the wherewithal to fight for it in court) seems not too far off base. At least within reason, and yes, I think you're fine to doubt the enforceability of a AIM trademark on another similar product whose name happens to involve the a-i-m string. Though the Lindows-Windows fiasco seems to back up the idea that rhyming with a trademark may be a bad deal.
Anyway, it's a trademark, not a copyright.
Will it be compliant with RFC 1149?
More like: "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch."
There are some musical recordings that are very expensive to make and take much longer that 14 years to recover costs on, let alone make a profit on. IIRC, a lot of classical orchestral recordings are like this.
And, speaking only for myself, having copyright on my work is not about making money, but about retaining some degree of control over what I write.
What? Without copyright, it would be much more difficult to create these expensive low-return creative works
Such works were already created before modern copyright existed. They were created with a 14 years copyright term as well, so there is very strong historical evidence saying that you do not need modern virtually infinite copyright for such works at all.
if copyright as we have it now would have existed in the 1700s and 1800s, there would be a lot of music that would have been way too expensive to perform for many orchestras however, which would ave reduced interest in such music and would have made far less funds available, resulting in less such works being created.
I'd probably go for the name GINFA: Gaim Is Not Fucking AIM!
Instant Messaging Freedom Corporation
I love it, all this effort to change the name, yet the downloadable files still have the name "gaim" in them. Personally, if you are going to change the name of your project, then go all the way, don't go half-baked.
From the dev website:
Tickets to Be Resolved before Going Public
#3
Get a webpage
#6
planet css stuff
#7
Get a logo
#17
get legal stuff cleared up with AOL
#19
Rename libgaim to libpurple
#21
Rename UI functions into the pidgin_* namespace
#24
Setup Certificates
#31
Alert Coverity of the VCS Change
#36
Trac allows account creation without e-mail or verification
#54
wierd blist overlay icons
Hmm... Maybe someone got a little overzealous here? Some of these are -not- done, and Slashdot has been made aware. I can't think of anything more 'public' than that.
As for the name... People are talking a lot of how it relates to 'pidgin' language. But 'pigeon', the common 'misconception', is accurate as well. When playing strict role-playing games like MUDs, quite often people want to talk about sending a message outside the game. A very common way to say it is 'I'll send you my pigeon.'
My first thought on the name was 'Oh, that's horrid.' My second was a long string of memories from one of my favorite games, DragonRealms. Maybe it's not such a bad name after all.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
All you had to do was google trademark and you'd find USPTO which explains how trademarks work. Corporations need trademarks, otherwise I could register a company say i'm releasing gmail before gmail is released and, uh oh, now i'm the trademark holder for gmail. Life doesn't work that way. I for one am quite pleased with the trademark process (this coming from somone having his own company and trademarked name).
:(
Gaim has no right to keep the name if they don't want to fight it. So goes life. Maybe I'm biased because I retain a high profile lawyer and fights like this would not last more than two certified letters.. but if they really thought they weren't breaking AOL's trademark, they could easily find lawyers willing to fight for them. But, I know the gaim team and they are quick to run away with their tails tucked between their legs
remember when AOL threatened about the smiley faces? "upper management" forced the smiley removal from cvs and iirc from a few releases (it was later readded when other projects defied AOL and included smiley faces in their aim-compatible products). that was about that time when i quit the gaim team. adium x seems to be better managed, alas they're strictly OS X
1) AOL objects to a program called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger"
2) The program changed the name to Gaim.
3) AOL trademarks AIM
4) AOL starts complaining about the name Gaim.
5) Gaim changes name to Pidgin.
6) AOL trademarks Pidgeon...
Don't even get me started on how stupid the idea of calling an IM client which is the combination of AIM, ICQ, MSN, &c is. From Wikipedia:. Compare that withCalling it "Pidgin" implies that it is unstable, underdeveloped, serves only the most basic of needs, and that no one uses it comfortably (a pidgin is never a native language). I understand the motivation, but I think it should have been called Creole instead, because Creole is the natural evolution of a Pidgin. It is fleshed out, spoken as a native language, and can be used in any situation.
As a user of gaim and a linguaphile, I just don't like it.
I'm curious as to what things you think wouldn't be created today if we went back to a 15 year copyright period? Movies make 90% of their income in theaters and the first couple months of DVD sales. Software obviously has a shorter shelf life than 15 years. Video games drop in price quite drastically after 6 months or so, and can't be making a lot more profit. Music, aside from the odd exception like the Beatles or Dark Side of The Moon is out of steam within 5-10 years. Books may be the slowest to move, but they're also quite cheap to create compared to other forms of media. And if there's a book falls out of copyright after 15 years without making a profit, I don't see a 3rd party company going to the trouble of doing a printing just so they too can continue to be unprofitable, so there's little chance of competition in that case.
Now, I'm not saying that some things don't continue to generate income past 15 years. Music generates royalties on nostalgia radio stations, movies and tv shows through syndication, etc. But as long as the original creator has a fair chance to extract compensation, I see no reason why we shouldn't start trying to expand the public domain again.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
That would be very coo. I'm all a flutter for it!
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Something like 95% of the income of copyrighted works happen in the first two years, as far as I can remember. (A quick google search doesn't give me a good source for this, I'd be very grateful if someone could reply with a source).
Anyhow. Copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of society, and honestly, when the creator has gotten 95% of the income the work will generate, wouldn't it be good it society could benefit?
Copyright lasted for a long time in the beginning, probably mainly due to the fact that it took a long while to propagate the materials to the intended audience. Today we have the internet. If it's good, it's available.
Copyright should be 2 years. And fair use should be expanded.
The copyright battle is as much a generational battle as it is anything else, the "old" are sitting on massive amounts of copyrights, most of them corporations. They bought out the copyrights very cheaply from the actual creator at an early stage.
So of course the elected officials are getting in line, most of them are "old" too, and the copyright holders are paying their pensions.
The young people of today are the ones infringing.
Boicotts generally don't work, since too few people join them. But we do have one weapon. Piracy.
It's time we made up our minds that sharing is civil disobedience.
We're fighting copyright holders with a goal to have copyright reduced to two years and fair use expanded. Piracy is a weapon the copyright holders actually fear.
Don't be a leecher, you're not fighting the good fight. Share.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.