Actually, uBlock Origin comes from original author of uBlock. Some time ago he said that he doesn't have time to develop Origin and passed project to other guy. Unfortunately, that guy didn't make any big changes in code (except adding himself as an author) and asked for donations. After quite big drama, original author came back, but he wasn't able to get back his project so he called it uBlock Origin.
It's worth noting that it all started on APRIL FOOL'S DAY (2015). That was the convenient day the author of the project decided to say in the comments for a random Github commit "hey, anybody wants to take this over? I'm out", without any previous discussion or announcement. Users assumed it was a joke but it was for real. Literally the first person to reply took over the entire project, and when the developer who was the real responsible for the Firefox and Safari port saw it, he stopped contributing instantly.
However, it's not that "the original author wasn't able to get it back". He is too proud of himself to admit the big mistake it was to give up the project to a random greedy teenager (who after the drama offered to give it back), so he decided to stay with the Origin name.
The result of this is that said teenager still makes a profit off the brand name (see ublock.org). People see that page and happily give him money thinking that they are helping the world.
By the way, it's also worth noting that the greedy teenager inflated his Github commits with minor changes and by hijacking the authorship of some commits, so that people would think that he did more than he actually have done (he can't really do much), and donate more to him. Eventually he just stopped making commits at all (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors), since people will still donate just for thinking that his domain is legit.
The moral of the story is that uBlock Origin is a good extension, but its developer, despite being talented, can't be trusted to be here tomorrow. He can just have a tantrum and delete the entire project or give it up to some other random teenager again.
The uBlock Origin name just adds to the confusion. The original developer (gorhill) should create a totally new project name. Word would spread that uBlock was the old thing and no longer maintained and that gorhill's new project was the future.
Even using a name like "uBlock Next Generation", which is less ambiguous than "uBlock Origin" and suggests "this is the new project", would still cause confusion. People unfamiliar with the project history would just call it "uBlock", leading to the same donation problems.
Sorry for the late reply. Tox was loosely organized under the umbrella Tox Foundation. When it was discovered that head and CEO (holding the purse strings) was abusing donation money, the devs split and created uTox. However, the Tox Foundation insists on holding the name, but as it's only one guy who doesn't appear to have taken any binding legal action, the name sharing persists.
Your comment is super confusing. Do you mean that he didn't have time to develop uBlock so then we went to make Origin? You wrote it the other way around. Which one does the original guy work on now, Origin?
I'll start over for him. Gorhill was the author of uBlock. He got tired of maintaining it, gave it up and willingly allowed chrisaljoudi to take the project. chrisaljoudi later started asking for donations, allegedly hasn't changed the code much except for some visual tweaks and added things like "Made by Chris" to the website. Some drama ensues, people accuse chrisaljoudi of being greedy, he makes some changes to how he presents things and Gorhill seemingly regrets giving the project up and instead of taking it back, (not sure if he tried or not) he forks the project and goes back to maintaining it, so now there would be 2 uBlocks. However there was an issue where Google removed the Gorhill's version from the store because it was a dupe of chrisaljoudi's version (which yes, used to "belong" to Gorhill), so Gorhill renamed the repo he was maintaining to uBlock Origin.
tl;dr Gorhill started uBlock, got fed up & gave it to chrisaljoudi, later did a reversal, forked the project and continued with maintaining that fork, only now his version is called uBlock Origin.
Origin is from the original author. The original author passed the torch to someone else who then used it as a donation source. So the original author came back, forked it, and titled their fork Origin.
the real reason, imho, was that gorhill got fed up of crappy bug reports and all the issue management hell. he forked and continued working with his own repo without ability to make issues. he probably hoped that this teenager had more energy for communicating with users and skills to merge commits back. someone probably know relevant issue numbers where drama was happening...
