It’s been surfacing all over that the instant messenger we’ve all learned to love, has been forced to be renamed due to a legal battle with AOL over the “aim” trademark.

The project has been named to  Pidgin, which wikipedia tells us that:

“A pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of two or more languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues, and usually a simplified form of one of the languages.”

A new domain has been registered to go with it at: http://www.pidgin.im/.

The trademark issue has actually been keeping Gaim… eerrr… Pidgin in beta status, so we can expect a final release real soon.

You can read a much more lengthy and detailed report about this in the official annoncement.