03 · What's In a Name? 2025 Feb 27

The Beehive project is now officially renamed “Keyhive”!

Changing names can be a painful process, and doing so as early as possible in a project’s life is helpful. As Phil Karlton famously said, there’s exactly two hard problems in computer science: caching, naming, and off-by-one errors. Naming is important for orienting readers, searching the web, and avoiding ambiguity. We wanted to make sure that the name was finalized prior to open sourcing the code.

There is a naming philosophy that says names should be descriptive, or at least present a direct “mental hook” that implies what the signified thing does. Additional puns and whimsey help with memorability.

The previous project name “Beehive” was intended to present a sense of safety and collaboration: bees build complex-yet-sturdy structures together while working independently, and guard their hives to make a safe space on the inside. This metaphor was also inspired by earlier conversations with Christine Lemmer-Webber about metaphors to help explain capability systems (like Keyhive) to folks not familiar with formal concepts from the object-capabilities world like Vats.

At the time that we decided on “Beehive”, the team was aware of namespace conflicts in the academic distributed systems literature¹. Over time it’s become clear that we also have this problem with packages in more than one language ecosystem. Since we don’t want to tie the project to Automerge exclusively, prefixing the core project with automerge-* was not appropriate.

We are retaining our apian naming for other parts of the project. BeeKEM maintains it’s pun on TreeKEM, and Beelay is the Keyhive-enabled relay.

Beehive is dead. Long live Keyhive!

Next entry: 04 · Opening the Pre-Alpha