After some legal troubles with AOL, the ever popular open source instant messenger (formerly) known as Gaim will now be called Pidgin. This is rather unfortunate news; the name Pidgin just isn't the same. Gaim has always been my instant messenger application of choice on Linux and Windows (I use Adium, which is based off of libgaim, which is now called libpurple, on OS X). You can read the full story on Gaim's new site at Pidgin.im.

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.