Check out pidgin.im, the new home of the instant-messenger-formerly-known-as-Gaim. The Pidgin team explains there the reason a name change was needed.

Gaim is henceforth “Pidgin” — a really awesome name for an instant messaging client. (If you aren’t familiar with the term ‘pidgin’ from linguistics, ). Note also that our ideological ties to the project (already significant, given that the core library is the foundation of our messaging connectivity and that we share open source philosophy) have strengthened as a result of name change… Adium’s a duck, Gaim’s a Pigeon (logo still pending, but it’ll be iconic, I promise), and the text-based client based on libgaim, formerly “Gaim-Text,” is now “Finch”. I for one welcome our avian overlords 🙂

Through the name change, ‘libgaim’ has also gained life of its own. The library which previously we were hacking together out of parts of the Gaim source is now an independent, recognized entity (as of Gaim 2.0.0b6, actually). Accordingly, it has its own name now: libpurple. (This is a play off ‘prpl’, which is what a libpurple instant messaging service, or protocol, plugin is called).