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TrueCrypt Gets a New Life, New Name
storagedude writes: Amid ongoing security concerns, the popular open source encryption program TrueCrypt may have found new life under a new name. Under the terms of the TrueCrypt license — which was a homemade open source license written by the authors themselves rather than a standard one — a forking of the code is allowed if references to TrueCrypt are removed from the code and the resulting application is not called TrueCrypt. Thus, CipherShed will be released under a standard open source license, with long-term ambitions to become a completely new product.
allow a fork to be released under a standard open source license?
Because I can take software with a standard open source license and put TrueCrypt's name back into it.
Not that I intend to do so, but it just seems off, somehow.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The sillier the name the lower the chances someone will abuse that name for commercial reasons. Saves a lot of money on trademarks.
Good ones: Inkscape, Thunderbird, Blender, VirtualBox, Linux...
Crappy ones: GIMP, Tahoe-LAFS, Ubuntu, Kdenlive, XFCE...
I personally think that you hit the sweet spot when you have a name which sounds cool and professional, is easy to remember, and at least tries to vaguely describe the function of the program.
It worked pretty OK for centuries. You could buy a "Plow from John Smith over in Blurn Hollows", or you could buy a "Plow from George Smith over in Redneck Fields", and nobody would be confused that they were called the same.
These days, if you buy a "FuxMatic3000XP from XentTeck" one day, you have to make sure if you want to buy one a year later that neither the FuxMatic3000XP nor the XentTeck Trademark have been sold in the meantime and are completely different things and/or products, or if the company itself did a product switcheroo in the meantime.
Respecting licenses is not done to respect the authors. It's done so you gain the credibility to have your own license enforced.
If the authors said "fuck'em", the next guy would come along and do the same and they wouldn't really be able to complain.
Their site says "proudly powered by wordpress". Err, "security", "wordpress", isn't that mutually exclusive?
no, I don't have a sig