This article was originally posted on Patreon and has been brought over here to get all of the Pidgin Development/History posts into one single place.
Keen observers may have noticed that most of our development services like code hosting, issues, code review, and so are all on .imfreedom.org domains and might have wondered why. Today we're going to tackle that topic.
In short, Instant Messaging Freedom or imfreedom as we often call it, is a non-profit organization whose primary purpose is to represent the best interests of libpurple, Pidgin, Finch, and Adium. What this means is that imfreedom acts as a legal identity for these projects which can represent these projects in legal matters as well as accept tax free donations due to its non-profit status.
imfreedom grew out of a trademark dispute with America Online while the project was still named Gaim. AOL had tried to defend their trademark against us a few times before hand by targeting the lead developers. This was usually made moot, because the lead developers would eventually retire. Due to this, they were no longer responsible for the project which would cause the lawsuit to have to be dropped. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.
However, when they came after Sean Egan, he reached out to the rest of the team and we decided to settle, change the name, and create the non-profit so that it could be targeted in legal disputes rather than the lead developers. We also wanted to have some cash on hand for things like legal council as well as handling payments for the projects like domains and so on.
While imfreedom had quite a bit of momentum behind it in 2007, just like Pidgin, interest in it dwindled over time. To the point where we even lost our non-profit status for failing to refile properly. Fortunately those days are more or less behind us now, but the organization never really grew past just libpurple, Finch, Pidgin, and Adium. This is why we've been trying to get the Instant Messaging Freedom name out there, to try and diversify past the libpurple projects.
imfreedom does have a yearly board meeting which is held privately, but minutes and recordings can be found on imfreedom.org. Aside from that imfreedom doesn't do a whole lot. We don't really have the time or money to do much more at the moment which is unfortunate. Hopefully with Pidgin 3's imminent release we can drum up some more interest!
I hope you're enjoying these posts! Remember they go live for patrons at 9AM CST on Mondays and go public at 12AM CST on Thursdays! If you'd like to support my work, you can join find a list of ways to do so here.
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