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Gaim renamed to Pidgen?!


pythonusr
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Pidgin was originally known as GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger. In response to pressure from AOL, the program was renamed to the acronymous-but-lowercase Gaim. As AOL's IM program AOL Instant Messenger gained popularity, AOL trademarked its acronym, "AIM", leading to a lengthy legal struggle with the program's creators, who kept the matter largely secret.

 

On April 6, 2007, the project development team announced the results of their settlement with AOL, which included a series of name changes: Gaim would become Pidgin, libgaim would become libpurple, and gaim-text would become finch.[4] The name Pidgin was chosen in reference to the term "pidgin", which describes communication between people who do not share a common language. [5] It also harks back to its original name, as the pigeon bird is a popular game bird and messenger. The name "purple" refers to "prpl", the internal libgaim name for an IM protocol.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Pidgin is a language term also. It refers to a lingua franca that forms when two different peoples who speak two different languages meet, usually in a commerce setting. It's a simplified language that borrows from both of the original languages, but whose language structure is usually similar to neither. Singlish is a modern example (Singaporean + English), and they think that Japanese originated as a pidgin between proto-Japanese people (Ainu or Imishi, I don't remember which) and Korean settlers (though the Japanese hate Koreans and usually don't admit this probability). They say Latin started as a Pidgin of two older languages also.

 

The idea, I guess, is that Pidgin is meant to be a bridge between all the different IM formats, thus, it's like a linguistic Pidgin.

 

They didn't name it that just for the bird.

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The real AIM is a terrible program so I'm not complaining about anything that disasocciates pidgin from AIM and AOL =)

 

Oh yeah. But I saw that they're making an OS X native AIM coming up. iChat apparently isn't "AIM" enough.

 

maybe terrible but it have the most users :)

 

~R

 

Doesn't mean they use AIM's software. Back when it was all dial-up for internet, AOL was the most popular supplier of internet. The chat thing was really popular, and it's ubiquitous transferred over.

 

I mean...Trillian....I know more people that use that than AIM. In fact, I signed up for my first new AIM name in six years, and still haven't logged in on AIM's software.

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