Splunk is from spelunking: caving, a lamp, feeling your way along in the
dark. An honest description of search-driven investigation -- powerful
with expertise, unforgiving without it.
Cribl is from cribble, to sift, from Latin cribrum, a sieve; the same root
gives engraving its maniere criblee, the dotted ground punched into a
plate. Both senses land together: the data is a medium to be worked and
thinned on the way through. A name about the material, not the
destination.
A cairn is a stack of stones on open ground, where the path is not
obvious, doing one job -- somebody came this way, and this is the way.
Three of its properties map onto things this project already does rather
than things it claims. It is left by whoever went first for whoever comes
next, which is the runbook culture and the reason every phase records
what was actually run including the failures. Anyone passing adds to it,
which is AGPLv3 throughout and an egress path that helps data leave.
And you can see it from a distance in daylight, which is a legible query
language, an AI that explains rather than divines, and a plan that
publishes what has not been proven.
Written into positioning.md rather than kept as a marketing note because
it is a reason the position coheres, not decoration on top of it. Also
noted there that it should not be turned into a slogan.
jcoffey-dev
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