Huge Moves in the land of libre software!

First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a good compromise between releasing often and undoing their reputation as a nice stable distro to base other distros off of and not moving at glacial speed so that distros like Linspire/Freespire move to being based on Ubuntu.

Second, Gaim has been renamed Pidgin. When I first saw Gaim on the BSD machines in the engineering lab, I thought to myself, “what’s this G-AIM.” Well, apparently AOL didn’t like that. So they threatened legal action against the Gaim team. However, the way they tell it, since Gaim was Gaim before AOL IM was AIM, I’d think that Gaim would have the higher standing in court. However, I am neither that well versed in IP nor a lawyer. So they became Pidgin. This is supposedly also why they couldn’t release a 2.0 and they are supposed to be releasing it by the end of this week. I’m pretty excited they can get this out of the way because I hear some great stuff is planned for 3.0!