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The history of LyX

This first description of the history of LyX was taken from LyX's wikipedia entry: Wikipedia:LyX

Matthias Ettrich started developing the shareware programm Lyrix in 1995(?).
Soon after this it was announced on USENET [wikipedia.org] where it received great attention during the subsequent years.
Shortly after the initial release Lyrix was renamed to Lyx due to a name-clash with some commercial software. In this course it was also GPL'd, which opened the project to the open-source community.
Version 1.0.0 of the software was released in 1999.

LyX's name

From Lyx Developer News n:o 10 as answered in a mail by Matthias Ettrich:

As a special 10th issue of LDN treat I asked Matthias Ettrich, founder of LyX and KDE, a few questions. One of them was about the origin of LyX's name.

LyX was supposed to be a program to write "beautiful documents", just like poems are beautiful texts. And it was an X11 application, so it needed an X in there. So I ended up with LyriX (after lots of thinking ;).

The name was changed, when I learned about a commercial wordprocessor from SCO that was using the same name. The idea to simply strip the name down to LyX came from David Johnson. It fit very well with the filenames: those I called *.lyx in good-old DOS fashion from the very beginning (I had to use an MS-DOS floppy disk at this time to transport LyX and LyX-Files from the university computers to my home).

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LyX Development News