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GAIM was called GAIM long before AOL were using 'AIM'. It's AOL who should be renamining their product, but looks like the needs of the corporations clearly outweigh the needs of the small guys.

Yeah, that was my impression too. GAIM was used years before AOL got a trademark on AIM, so in my mind AOL's trademark is invalid. But IANAL so what do I know?

It's the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Of course... how could I forget that...

How was gaim non-intuitive? the im stands for Instant Messenger. I think pidgin is a step down in that department. "I need to find an instant messenger.. I know, i'll just search google for pidgin"?


Whats a bit odd, is how long has it been called GAIM? And just suddenly someone at aol out of the blue decides they dont like it anymore? I think stuff like this should have a time limit. If a product exists for more than 5 years or so, and it infringes in its name like this, and the owner of the copyright doesnt say anything. Then that company should loose its right to take and legal action.

Edited 2007-04-08 18:47

If you want to get nit-picky about the im (small letters) doesn't stand for anything. It's called Gaim, not GAIM. It used to be call GAIM, and the IM used to stand for Instant Messenger, but the whole thing were short for "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger", hence the non-intuitiveness (is that a word?).

I agree, however, that AOL shouldn't be able to assert their trademark on a product named before the trademark was established. But since GAIM originally referred to AOL in it's title, I can see why the developers would take the easy way out and just change the name.

How was gaim non-intuitive? the im stands for Instant Messenger. I think pidgin is a step down in that department. "I need to find an instant messenger.. I know, i'll just search google for pidgin"?

If you search for "instant messenger" on google you will find gaim on the first page. I don't think it should be expected to have to be able to guess the name of an application to find it with google.

Whats a bit odd, is how long has it been called GAIM? And just suddenly someone at aol out of the blue decides they dont like it anymore?
Did you even bother to read the article???? This has been going on for some years now. It didn't happen "all of a sudden". The devs were advised by legal counsel to keep quiet about it.

You are quite correct, and this is with AOL has done what it's done - using unfair tactics to muscle out competition. This is not unusual for American companies, and the American corporate system (ie. bribe the government) lets them get away with it. Firstly - trademarks weren't meant to allow common dictionary names - and aim is most certainly that. Just the same as Windows. Both trademarks should have been legally and forceable removed by the powers that be, but since they don't work for the people, but for the business, that'll never happen. Corporate America, you gotta love it. NOT.

Dave

I completely agree, "Pidgin" is a great name. As for unintuitive names, what does "Outlook" have to do with mail? Or indeed "Windows" with double-glazing?

Take a hint from IKEA, they never have any trouble with naming, nobody can claim to own the names they use after all.

That being said, now I am awaiting Billy, the OS you assemble yourself and is very modular

The already have a Billy, but it's a bookcase that can be extended for CD's as well. If they made it into an operating system too, it would become very confusing (and modular).

The difference here though is that 'Firebird' was a poor name choice due to the already /present/ Firebird database project.

No, this story is more akin to Microsoft deciding to name IE8 'Firefox' and then suing Mozilla for infringement, forcing them to change their product name.

Yeah, ok, I agree that the cases (Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix & GAIM/Pidgin) are not compareble. And I sure think that trademark decisions should not be made only according to the amount of money someone has. If GAIM had their name before AOL, they should be able to keep it.

However, my point was just to say that although it may be sad to see a familar name to go, the name change itself may not be worth tearing your pants for... The new name is as good as the old one, and may soon be more familar to everyone than the old name. There are just more important things to worry about - like the general principles behind trademark and legal decisions in IT business nowadays.

Edited 2007-04-08 19:55

"No, this story is more akin to Microsoft deciding to name IE8 'Firefox' and then suing Mozilla for infringement, forcing them to change their product name."

Technically, it should be "this story is more akin to Microsoft deciding to name IE8 'Irefox' ... "

On that same subject, isn't "Bon Echo" (the name Gentoo and Arch use for Firefox, and a name which, iirc, I remember seeing a message about Mozilla suggesting for non-canonical versions of FF) crappy? IMO "IceWeasel" (the name of the app in Debian) is much, much better.

IceWeasel is a fork of Firefox. Bon Echo is just the codename for Firefox's 2.0 release. The reason that Gentoo used 'Bon Echo' instead of the official Firefox branding was that if you compile your own version of Firefox with the Firefox branding, you are not allowed to distribute the binary. If you don't use the Firefox branding, you are allowed to distribute the binary. Without the official branding, Firefox defaulted to its 2.0 codename, 'Bon Echo'.

Of note, Gentoo used to default to compiling without the official branding, with a use flag to turn it on, but now defaults to using the official branding unless you use the 'bindist' use flag to turn the official branding off.

Bon Echo was the internal name for the unrealeased alphas, betas and maybe RCs of Firefox, adopted because the developers felt that using a different name for the unstable versions could prevent uninformed users from installing it as if it was a stable release and then associate it to the usual temporary problems affecting a software during its development. So every Firefox release has a configure options enabling the standard name and icon, which are on by default only in the stable releases.

Gentoo and Arch can't distribute Firefox with its trade-marked name because they apply some patches to the original source, so they don't enable that option by default, but they don't distribute a fork, like Debian.

you wrote:
Do you remember a popular browser called Phoenix that was renamed Firebird later? Many users don't even remeber those earlier names anymore, yet the name change to Firefox caused a great deal of noise among its users during the time of change.

Not sure this example is exactly analogous -- the user base grew most significantly _after_ the name was changed to firefox. Imagine if the name were to change today from firefox to blackbird. A lot of users would be confused and it would take longer than you might think to get the word out.

Case in point: Wireshark is the new, maintained ethereal. I bump into a lot of folks who didn't know that, even though it was announced almost a year ago.

American, or European? It makes a difference you see, one has software patents, the other doesn't.

++ to both of you.

It's stems from protocol plugins... prpl... purple, see, completely logical, atleast that's their reasoning behind the name.

Just claim that it caused you to lose weight and you could make millions pushing the "Pigeon Diet"

is this screnshot just related to Suse Modifying it or is it the actual " new stuff "

It's too late to discuss prospective names.

even imessengr spelled it wrong in their article title...

http://blog.imessengr.com/2007/04/pigdin-gaim-has-new-name.html

Edited 2007-04-09 14:06

A GREAT name for a multi-protocol instant messaging client.

"Babel Fish" would be an even better name, then, but that one is certainly claimed by more than a few.

"Pidgin" is just a hard name to like.

"""
"Pidgin" is just a hard name to like.
"""

I agree. Gaim was a good name. But Pidgin? Pidgin reminds me of all the horrible documentation that I've gotten with various motherboards I've bought over the years.

You know the ones I mean. The ones where the explanations of the BIOS settings goes something like this:

Setting "on" to CAS 1 but may instable.
Setting "off" to CAS 2 ass possible unperformant.

Note to self:

Keep CAS 2 "on".

Sure, Adium is pretty, but IMHO Pidgin's interface is easier to look at. All that eye-candy makes it harder to have a quick look and grasp quickly what's happening, you know? But it's all just a matter of personal tastes really. Besides, I don't use Pidgin anyway cos it lacks support for webcam..aMSN looks just plain hideous, but atleast it does what I want

I have to agree, Adium is one of my favorite IM clients. Nothing really comes close to it's simplicity of interface.

Too bad others don't take it's lead. Most IM clients just have horrible interfaces, and it's a cross platform problem.

Sim-im is another good looking client.
http://sim-im.org/
http://gentoo-portage.com/up_img/img_800px/632.png

Edited 2007-04-09 13:24

Some of us just want to see a plain text window. In fact, even with most of the "features" of Gaim disabled, I still find it a bit bloated.

Right now, my Gaim client is using 10MB+ of RAM, which still seems like a lot for sending text and the occasional file.

*sigh* If only someone would make a client without smilies and themes.

I use adiumx on my mac and gaim^H^H^H^H pidgin on my linux box. If adiumx ran on linux....... hmmm

Considering your Adium is for OS X only, and GAIM runs on everything, I think utility trumps beauty in this case. I use Gaim on every OS I use; FreeBSD, Windows and Ubuntu.

Comparing Adium to Gaim is useless, as Adium is written for OS X using the native OS X GUI toolkit. Gaim is written using GTK and thus looks like an app written using GTK. Gaim is also skinnable, so it can look different than it's default.