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Re: Cygwin participation threshold



On Wed, Feb 24, 1999 at 11:10:20PM +0200, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
>Christopher Faylor <cgf@cygnus.com> wrote:
>CF> But, of course, maybe none of these observations matter.  We're talking
>CF> about perceptions, here.  It's my contention that if the EGCS project
>CF> had been named 'cyg-gcc' that it probably wouldn't have as large a base
>CF> of contributors.  It's probably the initial 'cyg' which is off putting
>CF> to people as well as the technical barrier of having to know both UNIX
>CF> and Windows code.
>
>    By the way, if you haven't answered that yet, changing name from
>gnu-win32 to cygwin has your motivation or FSF's?

I wasn't around for all of the naming decisions but I think that the
decision was entirely Cygnus's.  Maybe if Geoff is still reading the
list he can elaborate.  It would be interesting to see if contributions
slacked off after the original name change.

We have kicked around other names from time to time but, personally,
given the amount of trouble caused by the transition from cygwin32 ->
cygwin, I don't think I want to change the product name again soon.

In case it wasn't obvious, the 32 was dropped from cygwin32 to avoid
potential trademark infringement with some company whose name currently
escapes me.

cgf

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