I spent a while fixating on trying to discover why the macOS iCloud/“CloudDocs”/“Mobile Documents” daemon is named bird, w/ a cli in /usr/bin named brctl

After some digging I’m /pretty/ sure the b stands for uBiquity— an internal codename for what was marketed as “iCloud”; this is supported by e.g. [1]’s equivalence between ubiquityIdentityToken and com.apple.bird.token

I’m still pretty at total guess on r, leaning “record” (maybe also as rc → record since bird is code-internally BRCDaemon ; though it also seems likely c = container. I don’t think rc → runcom by way of initrc, bashrc, etc)

secondary theory is br is for “barrier” based on a loose symbol or two.

I’m pretty strongly guessing that “i” in bird stands for nothing so much as “OMG [ swe coworker], it’s not pronounced Bee-Arr-Dee, it’s pronounced BIRD” (cf gif, sql, … cuddle vs c-t-l [by rights hachyderm is ku-bECK-dl / ku-Bechdel territory] )

Anyway if anybody happens to know the answer, plz lmk. #apple #icloud #macos #brctl #clouddocs #daemon #engineeringhistory #lore

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1935/_index.html