[falcolas]

An obvious dig at wolfSSL - I'd be curious to see a comparison between the two. wolfSSL appears to be the more mature of the two (which makes sense, it's been in use for over a decade, and has a business dedicated to its development).

[ayrx]

Not quite, Thomas's avatar in many places is that of a bear. He has named a few of his works after bears, in particular his password hashing function Makwa.

[gardarh]

Huh, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the name was this thing: https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html . Apparently forest animals are popular in the SSL implementation writing crowd.

[falcolas]

I'll admit, they're a local company that I have a fair bit of respect for, so I'm a bit protective about people attacking them. That said, BearSSL is just too close to be coincidence.

The author could have easily continued with their trend of using alternative languages and ended up with something just as unique. UrsidSSL, BhaalooSSL, XiongSSL; all could have continued the trend without coming across as a sly attack.

It's not as if wolfSSL is a new kid on the block in the world of embedded SSL.

[mythz]

It has nothing to do with WolfSSL, Thomas uses a Bear as his avatar, done. I've never heard of WolfSSL, but Thomas's name and avatar was instantly familiar as someone who's contributed a wealth of invaluable Crypto knowledge to the world.

[vukk]

But then you don't have the homophone bear/bare, with "bare" having some nice connotations when your context of the topic includes OpenSSL.