Why can't I get Gaim from the Debian repositories anymore? I went to Synaptic to reinstall it, and the only "gaim" was for transitioning to Pidgin.

gaim is now pidgin. Same project, new name/image

In response to pressure from AOL, the Gaim program was renamed, as AOL trademarked its acronym, "AIM", leading to a lengthy legal struggle.

On April 6, 2007, the project development team announced their settlement with AOL, which included a series of name changes: Gaim became Pidgin, libgaim became libpurple, and gaim-text became finch.

The name Pidgin was chosen in reference to the term "pidgin", which describes communication between people who do not share a common language.

Arch Linux

I'm sorry the Gaim team was legally harassed, but considering that Gaim is open-source and no money was at stake (only their pride), I'm surprised they didn't just shrug and change the name right away.

Someone has to stand up to bully boy corporations who seem to think customers must obey them and follow their lead in all things...

Fair enough if your software was called acme-corp-is-naff (or worse!)

but gaim - I ask you! all AOL get from defending their "identity" (as they short sightedly saw it) was bad press and a bunch of people rubbed up the wrong way.

If instead they made minimal contributions to the code and maybe even allowed use of some branding they would have had loads of free advertising and in time a free code base for one of their services...

I bet they spend a fortune producing software that I have heard people allege is sub optimal.