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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

ReiserFS is named after the author, which is an oddity among file systems or open source projects in general. I wonder if it would have seen further development if it had been named something else.

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I don't know how much of an oddity it is, but Linux is probably the most known FLOSS. OK Linus himself wanted to name it "freak" or something like that.

But if I recall, it was not named that by Linus, but by the FTP administrator, who didn't like the name Linus chose.

The FTP admin knew no one would be interested in a project named "Freax"

Meanwhile we have a graphics suite called gimp, a 3D model loading library called assimp and if someone calls for blender, you can't be sure if it's the kitchen utensil or the 3d creation suite. :)

and a version control called Git. The old tech world was many things, but "politically correct" is far down that list.

I'll be fair and note that Assimp pre-dated the modern vernacular of the obvious word that comes to mind and was actually reasonable (Open ASSet IMPort Libray).

Debian = Debra + Ian

MySQL and MariaDB, named for the children of the founder. Similar vein.

ffmpeg (first F is for Fabrice Bellard)

DJBdns; named for Daniel (J) Bernstein...

There's a few.

of course the famous AWK as well

Linux -> Linus's Unix

Bourne shell -> Stephen Bourne

KSH (Korn shell) -> David Korn

AWK -> Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, Brian Kernighan

Debian -> Debra & Ian Murdoch

MySQL -> My Widenius

MariaDB -> Maria Widenius

DJBdns -> Daniel J. Bernstein

The Linux reboot system call supposedly accept Linus' daughters' birth date as a magic value [0]. It's not like that prevented people from rebooting their systems.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Personal_life

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