And before Pidgin was named Pidgin, it was named GAIM, which was short for GTK AIM, which was short for GIMP toolkit AOL IM, which was short for GNU Image Manipulation Program toolkit America Online Instant Messenger, which was short for GNU’s Not Unix Image Manipulation Program toolkit America Online Instant Messenger and it never ends.
Does anyone still use pidgin in 2024 even?
TIL Wayland is named after a town
I always thought it was the corp from the Alien series. 🤓
so is dracut and weston.
i think that naming software after towns in Massachusetts is somekind of red hat in-joke.
Openstack releases are named after the nearest town to conference that matches the next series in the alphabet.
It’s even neater. The name of towns/cites cannot be trademarked. The safest thing you can do when naming a project is naming it after a town so you don’t run into legal troubles in the future.
You can eventually trademark once you get big enough. As with all things law it’s a bit tricky. However, the default is that geographic locations aren’t trademarkable.
For further reading on when you can trademark.
https://www.yospinlaw.com/2016/06/15/trademark-on-a-geographical-location
Who’s going to take this as legal advice and name a project Apple?
Also, almost all of that is written in C, which is a successor to B, which is a simplified version of the Basic Combined Programming Language. There was never an A.
im almost sad that its linux that became the dominating open source kernel instead of “GNU’s Not Unix! Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”
(hird stands for “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth”)The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.
A recent video I watched by Stand Up Maths about an off by one error 1200 years in the making:
(before it was Kool, KDE was a reference to CDE, the Common Desktop Environment)
The logo looks like an ASCII butt.
“GNU is Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit” is still a better name for GTK than “GIMP ToolKit”.
It’s a name that will definitely raise some eyebrows in the less technically inclined circles. (and maybe a few “Pulp Fiction” references about “bring out the gimp”)
With just little bit of formatting, it would communicate the information infinitely better. Why don’t people make the minimal effort, once, when not doing leads to each and everyone having to figure out what the fuck it’s actually trying to say.
Apologies. I’m grumpy after a three hour meeting.
