by Mark Thomas as an experimental sucessor of the "X Window System" (its development has been cancelled for a long time; the latest release that is available on this website is from 2004).
The German Wikipedia still mentions the "Y Window System":
On general principle, I think sharing but a single character between names of products is perfectly reasonable for considering any names perfectly seperable.
No one's comparing this to 'y'combinator or 'y'ahoo.
'server' and 'window system' are completely different...
People who have been programming for a long time often have very good memories of old projects and software in which they had a lot of hope, but which failed at the end.
i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project, compared to the amount of programmers who would be aware of this project, if it succeeded
> i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project
At that time, what should replace X11 was a heavily discussed topic, so people who were already interested in programming under GNU/Linux at this time typically remember intense discussions on the internet about the pro-s and con-s of lots of proposals to replace X11.