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Comment by koide | Hacker News Reader

Now that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob"

Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!

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I don't think the "blob" in "binary blob" is the same as the database "BLOB" type. Rather, the word "blob" is chosen for its negative connotations and has the typical layman meaning.

Not at all, for example, search for "blob" here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4981376

There is one correct use, and three other uses talking about "binary blobs" without a negative connotation.

My opinion is that the layman term got mixed up with the database term and thus we got this mess (should I say blob?)

I don't think any of those are intended to imply "binary large object". They are just talking about non-human-readable data. They may not be implying any negative connotations anymore, but that's the origin of "binary blob".

Yes. http://www.openbsd.org/39.html Does that look like a "binary large object" to you?

If you actually go into the lyrics of the song: http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39 you'll see he's talking about blobs exactly as binary large objects. He never uses the phrase "binary blob".

He's just talking about of how are blobs in drivers evil for BSD, taking advantage of the evil amoeba concept.

I can assure you that nobody in the openbsd project is using blob as an acronym. To be clear, a binary blob is so named because it's an amorphous lump (as opposed to source code, which has structure).

[I agree, the word binary is redundant (nobody complains about source blobs), but not because it's an acronym. The phrase "unfree blob" would also be redundant, since blobs are unfree by definition.]

If you agree that binary is redundant, that's enough for me. Although I wonder how the word blob came to be used in BSD. You don't happen to have the first use in some mailing list archive?

Anyway, BSD's usage is not actually the general use of the word, as you can see in the link I've posted somewhere else in this nitpicking thread, people usually mean a bunch of bytes, without connotation.

But "blob" is a real word, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob

When people are using the phrase "binary blob" they are not actually picturing an amoeba-like evil alien, they are just talking about a big bunch of bytes. Many times without a negative connotation at all.

I understand better the origin of the confusion, though.

When people are using the phrase "binary blob" they are not actually picturing an amoeba-like evil alien

I am! I didn't even know blob was meant to be an acronym (or, in fact, anything other than what the word "blob" suggests) before this discussion, so, to me, binary blob always meant binary lump of goo-like stuff.

What? The b in blob does not stand for binary.

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/BLOB.html

It does.

But I'm kinda curious what you thought it stood for?

It doesn't stand for anything in normal speech. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blob?q=blob

In the context of 'binary blob' I think it would be clear it just means an amorphous mass of bits and not some Jargon File definition (which in turn is clearly a play on the regular word in itself).

That's like asking, what does the c in curious stand for?

Binary Large OBject.