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.
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.
Which bible passage is that again?
TIL Wayland is named after a town
so is dracut and weston.
i think that naming software after towns in Massachusetts is somekind of red hat in-joke.
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?
Openstack releases are named after the nearest town to conference that matches the next series in the alphabet.
I always thought it was the corp from the Alien series. 🤓
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.
Assembly.
Never let programmers name things 😁
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”)Wait why didn’t they keep unpacking the recursive acronym further? GNU’s Not Unix’s Not Unix’s Not Unix’s Not Unix I’d say that’s a pretty good amount although if there’s a mathematical way of formulating the unpacking of acronyms in a text I’d like to see the that repeated until infinity.
Just put it in a formal grammar:
GNU -> GNU's Not Unix's GNU -> gnu GIMP -> GNU image manipulation program
Not gonna lie, took me a moment of thinking and waiting for a search engine to load before I realized Kool Desktop Environment is just KDE…
I always thought the K in KDE just stood for KDE.
KDE stands for KDE is not a Desktop Environment.
While looking it up, I’m pretty sure I read that Kool Desktop Environment was changed to K Desktop Environment. Either way, it’s absolutely Konfusing regardless of how you slice it.
Konfusing? Everything is krystal klear in KDE, or you kan make it opaque, too, as all konfigurations are exposed for maximum kustomization
