What's in a name?

There's a bunch of things one needs to do to start a new OSS project. I think the most crucial step, but also one of the easiest ones, is to pick a license. It's generally easy because largely you have to target a specific community, and you may have dependencies that force your choice. Kernel work? GPL-2.0! Libraries? MIT or Apache-2.0, or LGPL-2.1-or-later in case of Linux. A full distro? Hmmm.

I've written a bunch of components for the consumer side in Clear Linux OS and we staunchly pushed GPL-3.0 for it. I think it was the right choice. We want to be open and honest about our intent that we are making and not make something that could be perceived as OSS but really isn't because it holds no teeth.

Having solved the license question we're now easily past a few house keeping things that one must do in case of a bigger project. But the toughest one is the smallest choice: How to name the darn thing! Sadly, I'm a terrible name picker. I don't think I can pick a good functional descriptive name for something that's essentially a collection of things that all build on another and share lots of code.

So I'm falling back to the safe thing. Just picking something out of context that's interesting and historical and doesn't have any sort of corporate name conflict attached to it.

When I think of what a Linux Distro is, to me it's really a "good way to stack a bunch of rocks". At least, that's what I want it to be. One that lasts a very, very long time as time proves it was indeed a very good way to stack a bunch of rocks. The pyramids we can find all over our planet are the evidence. Indeed they're still standing, and likely will for several more thousands of years.

One of these is a particular shabby one in what's now called Iraq. It's old, and pertains to the time when people wrote down important historical documents in clay tablets about the quality of copper. I'm talking about the Ziggurat of Urkut, or "Ur" for short. It's been around for a while. The Ziggurat has partially been restored, having been weathered and overrun by sand.

I've been doing OSS stuff for 25+ years now. It's a long game. One shouldn't get too attached to things they've made early on. Some OSS projects don't outlast the lifespan of small birds or insects. And some don't catch on for many years. As I'm writing this I'm very much aware that what I'm doing right now might not go anywhere at all. And if it ever does go somewhere, it will be years, most likely, before there's any sort of significant use of it.

So, let's just focus on stacking rocks in a really good way for a bit.

--sofar (aka Auke)