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Re:Hiawatha Webserver by fastball on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:49AM (#28744526)
Generally when you name something after a person / group of people, it's because you want to respect that thing, not disrespect that thing.

Especially with Open Source projects, where you are dumping lots of worker into something you will (on average) get little recognition or thanks for.

Said another way: if this project hadn't been named Hiawatha, you probably would not have done "a little digging", so on balance the naming of this project has increased the awareness for Native American tragedies. I certainly don't see a way in which this hurts Native Americans.

Re:Hiawatha Webserver by strogonoff on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:34AM (#28744760)
I suspect to some degree it could be about the icon that goes along with the name[0], which might seem a bit of a caricature.

Otherwise, since the project doesn’t seem to be directly referencing a tragedy and couldn’t reasonably have been named with the knowledge of the connection, how can this naming choice strike someone as inappropriate?

[0] https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/images/hiawatha_logo.png

Re:Hiawatha Webserver by arp242 on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @08:51AM (#28758678)
Fairly certain that the name and logo are both derived from the "little Hiawatha" comics.[1] It seems they never really took off in the states, but they're fairly common in the weekly Donald Duck cartoons, at in the Netherlands when I was young.

[1]: http://www.toonopedia.com/hiawatha.htm

Re:Hiawatha Webserver by denton-scratch on Monday October 04, 2021 @08:01AM (#28745583)
I presume the native-american name is supposed to reference the Apache project. When I saw the name, that's what I assumed.