BeaverBlogg

For those who are not familiar with Gaim it’s a great open source instant messaging client. It supports several protocols suchs as MSN, ICQ/AIM, IRC and a few more.

Being a long time user of Gaim myself I’ve eagerly awaited the new version that was released as a first beta over a year ago and now have gone up to it’s sixth beta. There hasn’t been any official information about the slow development (long ago we had a new version each week and then it slowed down) until a few days ago. Apparently there have been some legal issues with the name “Gaim” since AOL have registered “AIM” as their trademark for their own IM client. After over a year of hassle around the name the developers reached a settlement with AOL that unfortunately require the project to change name (I really liked the name Gaim). The new name was decided by the developers to be Pidgin and they’ve also moved to a new server with their website, abandoning their SourceForge hosting for their website and source control and just keeping the download section there.

For those who want to know more there is a long message on the front page over at http://www.pidgin.im/, you can also download the latest version (Gaim 2.0 beta 6, still no new release with the new name). If you are tired of all the crap in Live Messenger or want a great client for Linux or Mac OSX I really suggest that you check Gaim, sorry, Pidgin out!