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Comment by drxzcl | Hacker News Reader

Did they really have to drag the Dutch east India company into this by using that logo? It's going to make things... complicated around here.

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Don't really see why you got downvoted. It looks like they copied the logo exactly[1]. I'm rather surprised anyone would want to be associated with such an organization.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

That is a bit odd, but kudos to them for finding a new way to play with the word "Java". I thought they'd all been used up by the late 90s.

Yeah, exactly. I was looking at the logo, and I thought "huh, that looks exactly like the Dutch East Indies company logo!"

After ctrl-f'ing to the first mention of "Dutch", I had to chuckle at their explanation though.

Besides, it's not like most technical product/project names are so great. I enjoyed this reference & their pun.

I'm kind of shocked that people here immediately recognize the logo for company that (according to wikipedia) stopped existing in 1799.

The VOC is important enough that you will learn about it in history classes in school, at least in some countries.

It's of historical significance.

It was a subject of this history video with 400K views on a pretty popular channel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zPIhMJGWiM8

Why would it make things complicated?

I think the VOC has ceased operations a long time ago (as opposed to the Hudson's Bay company)

Because for a lot of people in a lot of countries VOC was an oppressive regime. Sure, times were different, but these days you would put them into some sort of crimes against humanity tribunal. They caused a lot of suffering, so in a lot of places using that logo is not politically correct at all.

Crazy fact I just learned: The V.O.C. actually still exists as the Republic of Indonesia. Unfortunately at the moment it's not very common to put rulers of sovereign nations on humanity tribunals, regardless of the extent of their misdeeds.

Every nation has bad episodes in its history. What good would punishing the present-day Republic of Indonesia do?

I wasn't talking about punishing them for deeds in the past. Anyway, punishing heads of state of democratic countries is a bit weird anyway. We're not punishing Bush or Blair for the mess in Iraq either.

But we should be.

To what degree is the Republic of Indonesia actually ruled by the same folks that controlled the VOC?

Not the same people of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Papua_Movement

In a word: slavery.

The same reason most countries don't romanticize historical invaders / occupiers. Turns out it's not a cute memory when your people were on the business side of the invasion.

I think the business side of the invasion, in this case, was the business side of the invasion.

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