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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.

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13 days ago
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concreteclam concreteclam
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  • +2 diggsBuryDigg
    concreteclam  by concreteclam on 04/30/2008
    For those who are interested, here's the original "support" ticket and subsequent arguments on the Pidgin developer site: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986
  • +1 diggsBuryDigg
    duerra  by duerra on 05/02/2008
    As 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 ...
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