Haiku OS...Noticed Something a Little Strange

I was updating my Haiku VM and noticed something a little strange in Top. I checked some Ps output and...yup. It's there too.

Do you see the weirdness?

If not, I'll try making it more obvious.

The "Big Brother" one was the first thing that caught my eye. Was something infecting Haiku?

Who would bother targeting an operating system with a sliver of market share? An OS still in development, for that matter? Perhaps a pissed developer?

These thoughts were going through my head as I weighed the decision to shut down the VM in case it was doing something to probe the network.

I did a quick check online for more information about this...surely someone else had noticed weird processes like that. I found that someone had indeed noticed and asked about this awhile ago; they were pointed to the AppManager.cpp source in Github.

So..."Big Brother" is a humorous way of naming a watchdog process. What about the ancient movie reference? I found a chat transcript from someone else who was rather puzzled as well:

So they're...intentional?

I understand geek humor being integrated with different projects. I'm hardly surprised when I hear there's some little easter egg hidden in the source code, or when there's a somewhat obvious integration of technology with a geeky cultural icon (like OS/2 having a release named Warp.)

I'm not quite so sure about the wisdom of having something with ominous connotations being used as a thread name in a process list, especially in the age of Edward Snowden. And there's something about having a reference to Austin Powers that just...doesn't fit at all into the project. It's not in a theme. It's not...anything. An inside joke? Is it trying to date the project in some way?

At best these are quirks that make you pause and wonder if someone drank too much before making a commit. At worst doing things like this adds to a perception that the project isn't really meant to be taken seriously. At least, in my opinion.

I'm all for fun jokes and geeky humor. I love the little hidden easter eggs in out of the way places. I'm just not sure about humor that pops out in a nonsensical manner like a hernia bulge with no rhyme or reason, hinting that it's up to something nefarious.