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Helix Code Changes Name To Ximian
Ambrosius27 was one of a number of people who has sent the word that Helix Gnome is nada mas. It's now....Ximian - they've even got a name-change FAQ and everything.
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Gnome's
Now
Owned by
Monkey
Enthusiasts!
Still, "Ximian"? Yikes.
Heh, your theory dovetails nicely with the fact that my business cards all read:
Ian Peters
Infinite Monkey
Just to add fuel to the fire...
--
Ian Peters
Nat and I arrived to the name "Helix Code" (which was the name under which we incorporated our "International GNOME Support" company) after much debate.
The project began By the end of the summer we were still using IGS as our name, and we had been talking to a lot of people about IGS. Although we did not like the name, and we started looking for a new one.
Nat had picked up the name Hopscotch, which I did not like. The name also had problems because some company owned the trademark for the name, so we had to look for another one. The debate for the name had created so many constraints that we were uncapable of agreeing to the suggestions that the other one did.
Eventually, we came up with two lists of suggestions, and Nat said `Ok, remove the ones you dont hate from my list, and I will do the same to yours'.
And we ended up with two empty lists.
So we were in this Evolution kind of mood (because of our product, and our recent interest in evolution), and Nat suggested finally `what about Code Helix?' and given our previous frustration, we quickly agreed on it. We later that day changed our minds, as we thought that Code Helix would make people think `They do developer tools' (I do not remember what was the thought process that followed here), but we changed the name to `Helix Code'.
Now, this was not a final name, it was just a temporary name that we would use to incorporate the company, and we would change it as soon as possible. Neither Nat nor I liked the name originally, so every time we told a friend "We are starting a company!" when the question about the name came in, we would explain for five minutes why it was not such a great name and so on.
We began the work to find a new name almost in march 2000, when we were told by our lawyers that it would be very hard to avoid other companies to produce Helix products (like this complete copy of Helix Code that is not associated with us: Helix Code UK).
A temporary name that Jacob liked was "Loolix Bode" which was what the ATT 411 service guessed when we called for information about the company once.
The process of the name change had been going for a number of months and many names were suggested. Both Nat and I experimented extreme frustration and lack of imagination after countless meetings to change the name. Jacob to this day calls the company "Loolix Bode 2000". And Ian still calls the company "Mr. Rupert's Quality Software Group" (mr rupert being the Helix mascot).
After a year, I am very attached to Helix Code, but the name and products we would produce would be pretty much unprotectable, and there would be no guarantee to customers that they were purchasing software or services from us. And too many companies already had Helix-prefixed products that were in similar domains.
There were a lot of nice sounding names, and various names we scanned from various countries, towns, cultures, languages, but most of the ones I liked were at least taken on the DNS.
There are even more details to the story, but they are quite boring.
The Ximian name fits nicely with our monkey logo and with our monkey culture and with the evolutionary theme that has been in the company since we started it.
Best wishes,
Miguel.