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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, that really helps.

As an open-source advocate, my first thought was, "Why the hell is Google releasing a version of a protocol that Linus Torvalds wrote?"

Without that context, it would be like Google throwing up an announcement, "Introducing Google's Linux Kernel 5.0!"

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Yeah, that was my reaction, and it made me sad that Google has so eroded my trust over the decades that I was turned off at seeing an announcement implying they are deeply involved in core open source tools. I mean, who else but companies swimming in cash can truly deeply support this stuff, and for the most part, the people working on these tools really do care about the open source community. But Google's reputation is so tarnished that my gut reaction is at odds with my rational one, and that's a sad thing to realize.

I wasn't aware that the maintainer of Git works at Google, so I was a bit surprised by the announcement too. But it wasn't because of any drama like Google eroding my trust or whatnot, just that my information was incomplete so my gut reaction was irrational.

That may seen odd, but it could happen in a open-source world: multiple parties releasing different versions of the same piece of software and calling it the same.

One fun example of this is the so-called RPM "5" fork[0], which is basically dead and almost entirely unused[1].

The result is the main RPM everyone uses will probably stay at version 4.x forever.

[0]: http://rpm5.org/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rpm_(software)#RPM_v5

They could skip a version like PHP did. Among other reasons, since books and articles about PHP 6 had already been written long before PHP 5+1 came out, they went with 7.

Sure, they could. I don't think they've felt the need to. RPM tends to change slowly and conservatively.

Both Git and Linux are trademarked, presumably to prevent such hijinx

Linux is trademarked because of some "hijinx"...

"Initially, nobody registered it, but on August 15, 1994, [...] filed for the trademark Linux, and then demanded royalties from Linux distributors. In 1996, Torvalds and some affected organizations sued him to have the trademark assigned to Torvalds, and, in 1997, the case was settled." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright,_trademark_and...

Isn't it customary to at least rename the fork?

Customary, but unless the name is trademarked, not required.

Some licences require a change of name for substantial modifications, e.g. the Artistic Licence and Apache Licence v1. But those kinds of clauses are pretty rare nowadays.

Same here. I was like, "If there are about to drop 3 versions at the same time like angular, I need to you use SVN ASAP".

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