The founder and owner, Wolfgang Denk, sadly passed away in 2022. https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2022-October/497955.h...

Wolfgang was a great man. Beside of U-Boot his company was also deeply involved in the Linux real-time extension Xenomai: https://lore.kernel.org/xenomai/[email protected]/

NABLA is one typo away from some unsavory people.

For those missing the reference, NAMBLA is the "man/boy love association" (as in pedophiles).

Back before SWATting was a thing, signing up people you disliked as members of NAMBLA was all the rage.

If you ask me it was funnier, and less risk of anybody actually dying.

It's also the name of a mathematical vector derivative operator (∇).

Interesting, I only knew it as the del until now

OMG, how did you remember that

  nabla x nabla = labla(ce)?

I think you meant Laplace (Laplacian operator).

That's the mnemonic I was taught, but granted, it takes some artistic license to make it rhyme.

Ha! lol ^^ Ok, I see!

And I thought only ∂ is called "del".

i thought it was the symbol for gradient?

edit: ah, the name of the symbol for the gradient operator is nabla

I mean, North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes are not that bad.

I used to study news, which meant reading a lot of it, so maybe I'm not representative, but I immediately noticed that.

Whoever tastefully drew their logo in lowercase might've warned them not do it as all-caps elsewhere, if they were aware of the US brand issue.

If I had to refer to this brand name in text, such as in specs, I wouldn't do all-caps like they have. (To US people, who may be familiar with the toxic brand from written news, US journalism style guides tend to put initialisms and acronyms in all-caps, unlike in parts of Europe.) I would capitalize only the first letter.

To scientific-oriented minds it only refers to the mathematical operator.

I personally did not know about, and don't care about, the "horrifying" thing you see in nabla. And I will keep being like that.

If we were to start tracking all the things that are "a typo away from a bad thing", not a lot of words would be left.

I'm sure you have a list of things that you would not want to be "one typo away" from.

I don't. One typo away means it stays different.

There are too many things to really worry about it too much. It's not really how language works anyway - like would you say "You don't want to call your organisation the Rare Books Association because 'rare' is only one letter away from 'rape'?" - clearly that's ridiculous.

"Rare Books A**ociation" already has 1 bad word right in it. No typo needed.

Never heard of the term in question, is the word similar sounding to this by accident or is it tongue-in-cheek inspiration of some sort?

I've never heard of it either until reading these comments (I'm in Australia). Assuming the NA in that acronym means North America (?) and given that Denx and this new entity is German it's probably safe to assume that they haven't heard of it either.

I've seen other comment for the supposed unsavory thing but I've never heard about it, like, at all. Only know it as the mathematical operator. Also being used as card name for a children card game that's a bit infamously censor heavy so I think it's safe enough https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Mathmech_Nabla

Don't help those unsavory people hog a large part of our shared namespace.

Doesn't most of the embedded Linux world run on u-boot? whats going to happen to that market now?

Seems that it will be maintained by those using it (eg: companies and hobbyists alike)

U-boot will not die from this

The answer is in the link you clicked: U-boot will be maintained as the open-source project it is, with some engineers previously working at Denx going to a specific different company with the express purpose of supporting U-boot.

U-Boot is pretty cool, I like how scriptable it is.

U-boot is scriptable, but it's awkward. You put snippets of shell-like commands into environment variables and then connect them all together. It's the most powerful bootloader I've ever worked with, but writing new stuff and debugging it is tedious.

Yeah, I strongly prefer barebox, if it's an option. You can just write shell scripts in it.

So long and denx for all the fish!

And for the (yellow) submarines!

Damn i have a Denx parallel port JTAG adaptor Somewhere in my stock:

http://www.zoobab.com/denx-bdm4jtag

Enjoy retirement!

Wolfgang and me introduced the concept of the SPDX-License-Identifier, see https://spdx.dev/learn/handling-license-info/ also landed within the Kernel later, beside of many things we did for our stuff at Siemens, upstream first such as https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/board/siemens

  > After 20 successful years in the embedded world, the DENX holders decided to wind-down operations and retire. ... As a result of this process, the company entered voluntarily liquidation. 

  > Still looking for great support ? Former DENX’s engineers joined NABLA, a new company created to provide high level support .... You will find the same expertise and quality support you experienced in many years in DENX.

first impression is, i wonder if they ever considered just selling the company to the employees and let them continue it...?

Looks like the founder passed away a few years ago, perhaps this was easier for his inheritors.