digg

Facebook Connect Join Digg About

Pidgin fork resulting from developer / userbase skirmish

sourceforge.net — As many people have noticed, Pidgin 2.4, the popular multi-protocol IM client, touts a new "feature": an auto-resizing text input box. This has resulted in general unhappiness for many Pidgin users. The developers' condensed response? "We're right, go f**k yourself." Enter a new user-focused fork: Funpidgin.

Who dugg this?

Digg DudeWhat is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community. Take the Tour to learn more.

3 Comments

show profanity settings
expand all
  • duerra, on 05/02/2008, -1/+4As much as I don't want to dog on anybody, the Pidgin developers have a LOOOOONG history of treating their users as if they're complete idiots. Many well thought out, rational arguments have been made throughout its history, and its former history as Gaim, only to have the developers completely stonewall any opinion that doesn't match their own. A couple years ago there was a huge upcry when Gaim (at the time) removed a whole host of options from the application.

    I'm surprised that it didn't fork then, but it's short-sighted to say that the reason it is forking now is because of this one little feature. That isn't the reason Pidgin is getting forked - it's getting forked because of the history of this app, and the people running it who have a, for a lack of a nicer way to put it, complete contempt for their users.

    Here's a link to an example of one of the IRC conversations when trying to rationalize with one of the developers: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=539238&ci ...
    -----
    (Shameless plug: Please check out my new community-oriented lyrics site and help me build a community at http://lyrictalk.net - I've got no other way to spread the word!)
  • concreteclam, on 04/30/2008, -0/+2For those who are interested, here's the original "support" ticket and subsequent arguments on the Pidgin developer site: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986
  • wpyh, on 05/19/2008, -0/+1Reading the IRC logs posted (by CronoCloud) at http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=539238&ci ... , I'm seeing CronoCloud pestering the developers with comments. And insults. Meanwhile, the developers are ignoring his requests. I don't know whether he is one of the developers of funpidgin, but that kind of attitude is too bossy to be acceptable.

    I actually agree that the fork should happen, and that the pidgin developers should write their code however they pleases. It's open source, and the developers are not personal slaves.

    However, I would personally continue to use pidgin.

  • Add a Comment

    Login or register to comment!
    Or, sign-in super fast with your Facebook account ...

© Digg Inc. 2009 — Content created and posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain | Terms of Use Updated | Privacy Policy
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.