The program is designed to be extended with plugins. It is included by default in the operating systems Tails and Xubuntu.
Pidgin supports multiple operating systems, including Windows and many Unix-like systems such as Linux, the BSDs, and AmigaOS. Libpurple supports many instant-messaging protocols. Pidgin provides a graphical front-end for libpurple using GTK+. Other visual changes were made to the interface in this version, including updated icons. Pidgin 2.0.0 was released on May 3, 2007. However, Pidgin 2.0 was not released as scheduled Pidgin developers announced on April 22, 2007, that the delay was due to the preferences directory ". Following the settlement, it was announced that the first official release of Pidgin 2.0.0 was hoped to occur during the two weeks from April 8, 2007.
ĭue to the legal issues, version 2.0 of the software was frozen in beta stages. The name "purple" refers to "prpl", the internal libgaim name for an IM protocol plugin. The name Pidgin was chosen in reference to the term " pidgin", which describes communication between people who do not share a common language.
On April 6, 2007, the project development team announced the results of their settlement with AOL, which included a series of name changes: Gaim became Pidgin, libgaim became libpurple, and gaim-text (the command-line interface version) became finch. As AOL Instant Messenger gained popularity, AOL trademarked its acronym, "AIM", leading to a lengthy legal struggle with the creators of GAIM, who kept the matter largely secret. In response to pressure from AOL, the program was renamed to the acronymous-but-lowercase gaim.
They have received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having communications encrypted with keys the providers don't have access to ( end-to-end encryption), making it possible for users to independently verify their correspondent's identities, having past communications secure if the keys are stolen ( forward secrecy), having their code open to independent review ( open source), having their security designs well-documented, and having recent independent security audits. On 6 July 2015, Pidgin scored seven out of seven points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard. Support for other IM protocols was added soon thereafter. Development was assisted by some of AOL's technical staff. The emulation was not based on reverse engineering, but instead relied on information about the protocol that AOL had published on the web. It was named GAIM ( GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger) accordingly. The earliest archived release was on December 31, 1998. The program was originally written by Mark Spencer, an Auburn University sophomore, as an emulation of AOL's IM program AOL Instant Messenger on Linux using the GTK+ toolkit. Gaim 2.0.0 beta 6 running under GNOME 2.16.0 For this reason it is included in the privacy- and anonymity-focused operating system Tails.
Pidgin is widely used for its Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) plugin, which offers end-to-end encryption. The number of Pidgin users was estimated to be over three million in 2007.
Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a free and open-source multi-platform instant messaging client, based on a library named libpurple that has support for many instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to simultaneously log in to various services from a single application, with a single interface for both popular and obsolete protocols (from AOL to Discord), thus avoiding the hassle of having to deal with a new software for each device and protocol. C ( C#, Perl, Python, Tcl are used for plugins)