Please re-add original author to docs and license
Hello, I&#x27;m Gabriel, the original author of Guake.<p>Let me clarify the whole story:<p>In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I&#x27;m from Brazil).<p>In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the &quot;drop of water in the desert&quot; kind of teacher. He was trying to convince everyone that they could move from MS Windows to GNU&#x2F;Linux and that the available desktop software was pretty decent.<p>The only catch is that he used KDE2 and all the &quot;cool&quot; desktop apps he was showing were built on QT, like a good pupil I always tried to pair up an equivalent GTK option to every QT app my teacher showed to the class.<p>That worked well for everything: Music Players, Photo Viewers, etc.<p>One day he showed Yakuake (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;system&#x2F;org.kde.yakuake" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;system&#x2F;org.kde.yakuake</a>) to the class and everyone went bananas, this was such an amazing tool.<p>But then I did not have a good alternative for GTK if I wanted to press F12 to get a drop-down terminal I&#x27;d have to install libqt on my Debian?
No way!<p>I set out to write an equivalent of Yakuake for GTK+ (hence the name Guake, with &quot;G&quot; for GTK), at the time I did not know exactly how D-Bus worked and had no idea of how to write Python extensions in C.<p>The very first working version of Guake was a Gnome Applet that used GTK bindings to libvte to make a terminal always available.
Was still not good enough for me.<p>The next step was to write a regular GTK Window application and try to make it disappear, but I was having a lot of trouble binding F12 globally, it only worked well on Metacity which was the default window manager for GNOME2 at the time.<p>Guake&#x27;s user experience was not great, it only worked well on Metacity but was good enough for me to show to my teacher, I was so excited I was able to create my very first GPL software and publish on source forge. I was ahead of everyone in my class at the time, I was learning on my own the things that would be taught only in the next semester and many things that we would never learn in class (such as  Python programming).<p>Some months go by and Guake-Gnome-VTE (the original name) gets some visibility, and this guy Lincoln de Sousa reaches out to me, he told me he had fixed the global keybinding problem by writing a Python extension in C, also he refactored the whole code and even applied GNOME Human Interface Guidelines to it.<p>It sounded great to me, I was so excited that someone else was interested in Guake, and made improvements to it, I was in awe with open source.<p>Except for one thing: Lincoln rewrote a lot of things that were working, just for the sake of cleaning up the Python code the aesthetics of it (actually he was applying PEP8 which I had no idea what was before this)<p>I had these mixed feelings: in one Guake had become what I wanted it to be, the global keybinding worked anywhere, the UI looked even better and the code was a lot easier to understand.<p>On the other a lot of the code I had written was deleted, I was not a skilled python developer when I wrote the first version of Guake, so I had spent several hours reading, coding and trying things out.<p>Anyways, the whole thing was a win-win, yay open source, now Guake had 2 maintainers putting a lot of time and love into it.<p>After some time Lincoln proposed that we moved the code off of Sourceforge to a git repository, self-hosted (we had a very &quot;purist&quot; mentality regarding FOSS and were terrified of having our code hosted by a proprietary software such as Github), he had way more experience than me on pretty much everything and he took reins: the code was hosted in one of his servers and all I did was pay for the domain.<p>In retrospect, I wish I had just pushed the code to Github at the time, so no the commit history would be lost.
The irony in having a purist FOSS mentality: the code was hosted on a server that I eventually lost access to.<p>Also, instead of importing all the commit history from Sourceforge we just pushed the code to git.<p>You can look at the first commits on github:<p>commit 4f4ab35d5cb2363dd464e6b252d1c798bd01c2fb
Author: Lincoln de Sousa &lt;lincoln@minaslivre.org&gt;
Date:   Sat Oct 6 13:56:50 2007 -0300<p><pre><code>    patch came from svn
</code></pre>
commit 8973af85108c889f7dc16af2d8443d0f8ff3ec05
Author: guake_root &lt;guake_root&gt;
Date:   Wed Aug 1 02:35:20 2007 +0000<p>The &quot;guake_root&quot; commit swallowed all the history of the original code I had done.<p>In 2008 I moved out of my city to work for a big corporation in Rio de Janeiro, there my FOSS purism slowly evolved into tolerance for proprietary software, eventually, I even got an iPhone and a MacBook.<p>That&#x27;s when I stopped contributing to Guake: I had moved to MacOSX and the project had been taken over by other maintainers.
But even the icon is still the one I design on Inkscape, Guake was my first open-source software, I put a lot of time and love into it.<p>Today 14 years later I seldom use Guake because I seldom use a Linux Desktop, but I must confess that seeing my original authorship vanish from the project is very sad.