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Comment by tejtm | Hacker News Reader

"Freenet" already had a very specific meaning in the early ninities which could only be obscure if one was not paying attention. I still maintain my freenet email address from 1991. I recommend you find your own name for your very comendable project, swiping an existing one is confusing and somewhat dodgy.

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It may have had that meaning in the early 90s but by the late 90s it was obscure, so much so that the domain freenet.org remained registered but unused from 1999 until I was able to acquire it in 2019.

Calling this "swiping" implies I was aware of the previous meaning, I wasn't. Moreover, in 25 years this may be the first time someone has complained about it.

In any case, this is all ancient history at this point.

The particular swiping in question happened a couple of decades ago now (I agree that it was a confusing ambiguity at the time); the proposed swiping now could also be a confusing ambiguity, but would be by the same people who were responsible for the prior swiping.

I disagree that any "swiping" took place as I wasn't aware of the prior meaning because hardly anyone was using it in 1999, nor did anyone bring it up at the time.

Similarly, no swiping took place more recently unless you think using the name of my own project is "swiping". I address this in more detail in a recent [1] reddit comment.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/1d05zw9/questions_...

I meant to be partly tongue-in-cheek in saying that, although this doesn't come through well in text, but I do share the present-day concern about people potentially becoming confused.

The confusion is a risk but I think it will diminish over time, particularly once we launch the new network.

The only other Freenet I know is (was?) a small ISP and Freemail provider in Germany. I couldn't care less about the name clash.

Freenet AG is now a pretty big mobile phone provider since it bought the biggest carrier-independent mobile phone contract provider.

Revenue about 2.5 billion Euro.

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

I found that forced namegrab by the original autor quite rude in the beginning, but now I made peace with that and like the name hyphanet even more. That whole drama backfired for him: First, there will be always this discussion. Second, the term Freenet is quite unusable in search engines, whereas hyphanet is nice and unique to find in search engines.

Yes, Hyphanet is considerably safer and does not compete with a multi-billion Euro corporation about brand rights.

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