I thought it was someone at Maidsafe, probably @dirvine, but I see the Storj guy using it in the same way in relation to their network.
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Yea a few terms cross projects now. I think it’s OK, you know what they say about imitation and flattery 
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I don’t like it, and that’s no mere whim on my part.
Here’s what I worry about: That Maidsafe will do the development work and slick marketers will take it and gain market dominance, thanks to the GPL, and the fact that they won’t be carrying any debt acquired during the startup phase.
An existing case is Debian and Ubuntu (which is just a reskinned Debian). They are blatant about it in calling their company “Canonical” as though they are the definitive version of Linux, and to some newcomers to Linux it might actually seem that way. So Debian has an army of unpaid developers, but Canonical earns the consultancy fees from enterprise users of their distro.
What is to prevent a similar outcome for SAFEnet?
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Meh~ no big deal me thinks.
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If you are brave enough to go down a rabbit hole. I’ll take you back 2 years to a google dev list where it “probably” started. The link below is your journey into the past…
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Thank you, I’ll go spelunking…
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Ah memories 
Nice recall David, I was trying to think when exactly that happened. I think you are right it was during some large discussion like this I think. I hope it was you or somebody on the forum that stared it all off actually as that fits quite well and re-enforces why the community is important.
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It does quite well
I recall that someone from the community, perhaps @dyamanaka, first used the term in a discussion and think that David immediately responded that he liked the term and it was immediately adopted by those in discussion. My feeling is that it was on this forum in the very early days, so about two years ago. But my feelings are not that reliable on details! 
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I personally like the term “farming” – esp given how its connotations tie into some of the natural-design philosophy that seems to underlie MaidSafe. I also like it as a counterpoint to the massive mining operations that have become a symbol for Bitcoin.
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You are delusional for even suggesting Ubuntu is a mere reskin of Debian.
Grizmoblust: you also should re-evaluate your choices.
It’s most notable distinction is its Unity desktop, while its guts is Debian. Looks like a reskin to me, for no particular end except self-promotion. Even the desktop is a fork of Gnome.
The ppa system is definitely an improvement that canonical has done. Also the installer is very nifty. I just installed 16.04 on my stepdads laptop and it automatically resized the windows partition so that he could dual boot.
Luckily that’s a moot point since he now wants to just blast away windows - after upgrading to 10 - and commit to Linux!
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Leaders lead. Nuff said.
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The exception hardly proves the rule, @smacz : finding an improvement hardly invalidates my point. And considering how much money they must have made off Debian’s work, they oughta be able to show something new: “oh! a graphical installer! wow, I don’t have to use the CLI!”
Sudo apt install is plenty good enough for me.
How about this, I nominate the term “farmer” should be credited to @dyamanaka as I am sure it was at the same time as looking at turtles hares and lots of other things. He has been an outstanding person to simplify things. From my recollection at least I would say credit should go to David for this one.
Also thanks David, it is surely a great term 
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Well, I don’t believe that you’re “delusional” for suggesting that Ubuntu is merely a reskin of debian, in fact, I believe you are correct that is essentially is a reskin.
That being said, that doesn’t mean that its not a valid fork of debian, as is crunchbang/bunsenlabs, mint, etc. Each has its own userbase, and they are free to try to out-market one another.
Nope. If you’re running Debian you will sometimes have occasion to visit a ppa website to get the appropriate deb package for an app for which the latest version (or maybe any version, if the developer is a moron who only developed on Ubuntu) is not to be found in Debian repos. It is nightmarish to find, in the typical case, that they have a different version of the package for half a dozen different versions of Ubuntu never mind finding an equivalent that will run on Debian stable. Evidently, the Canonical devs aggressively customize app packages and are at least nonchalant about breaking compatibility with other distros (even with their own previous versions) including Debian, presumably (if we are charitable) to get some more performance or use an extra feature of the app. It is, at the least, inconsiderate of the wider Linux ecology - they take and they don’t give back, from commercial rapacity. It is tempting to go further and suspect that it is an intentional policy, to break backward compatibility in order to coerce users who have to have a particular app to run Ubuntu.
EDIT: Resorting to Ubuntu repos seems to happen less and less for me. Nearly always nowadays I can get the latest or near latest version of something by including the Debian backports in my sources.list (which will, for example, pull down i3 4.11) and then using the backports switch on the command line, or rarely, temporarily have the testing repo in sources.list to get the very latest version (but that has the danger of pulling in unstable libraries, and ending up with an unbootable system).
On a related note, I’m currently playing with SparkyLinux which might be a suitable candidate for the non-geek refugee fleeing Windows. It is a turnkey, all-in-one packaging of Debian Testing for the home user, on a rolling release like its parent.
Not really something that warrants concern, honestly. The GPL and MaidSafe’s own patents protect against this.
Also the SAFE network is designed in such a way that trying to emulate it wouldn’t exactly be profitable.