G

pref.,suff.

1. [SI] See quantifiers.

2. The letter G has special significance in the hacker community, largely thanks to the GNU project and the GPL.

Many free software projects have names that names that begin with G. The GNU project gave many of its projects names that were acronyms beginning with the word “GNU”, such as “GNU C Compiler” (gcc) and “GNU Debugger” (gdb), and this launched a tradition. Just as many Java developers will begin their projects with J, many free software developers will begin theirs with G. It is often the case that a program with a G-prefixed name is licensed under the GNU GPL.

For example, someone may write a free Enterprise Engineering Kludge package (EEK technology is all the rage in the technical journals) and name it “geek” to imply that it is a GPL’d EEK package.