inessential by Brent Simmons

The New Ranchero Software

Ranchero Software, my old company, has actually technically existed in three different forms over the years — I’ve been an indie, then got a job and shut down the company, went back to indie and rebooted it, got a job, etc.

The most recent version — Ranchero Software, LLC — shut down a while ago. A year ago? I forget.

We got tired of reporting every month that it made $0. And we realized we had no plans to ever make money, since, well, I have a great day job at Omni.

But now it’s back, in a new way

The new Ranchero Software isn’t a company: it’s an organization on GitHub. Just today we moved NetNewsWire and associated repos to this new location.

We realized it would be easier if we had an actual organization with various teams — easier to manage, easier to add people, easier to set permissions, etc.

There was a little talk about what to call it. Name it after NetNewsWire? Or use the name Ranchero?

One of the things to remember is that it’s not just about NetNewsWire: there are also stand-alone frameworks and there’s another app: Rainier. (Which is way behind NetNewsWire. Nothing to see yet.) And we might do other apps, too.

So while we could have — a la the Apache folks — named the org after its founding project NetNewsWire, everyone preferred using the Ranchero name.

For me, at least, this is super cool. Ranchero Software lives!

PS You might wonder where the name Ranchero came from. It was 1996, and we were looking for a domain name that was 1) available, and 2) trendy. In those days, the hot stuff was Tango and Marimba and similar. We found that ranchero.com was available, and it kinda fit in with those names — plus it sounded kinda western — so we grabbed it.

PPS No, Ranchero Software isn’t an actual organization with papers filed anywhere. It’s just a thing on GitHub. But that’s all it needs to be.