Terry Pratchett, who died last week at the age of 66, will live on in people's memory thanks to his books. But thanks to a tribute from the web community Reddit, Pratchett's name will also live on in a way in keeping with his own ideas.

Going Postal, Pratchett's 2004 Discworld novel, introduces "the clacks" (a form of telegraph, and thought by many fans to be the Discworld's early predecessor to the internet in the books). A murdered "clacksman" called John Dearheart is honoured by other characters with GNU John Dearheart, a piece of code that keeps his name running up and down the clacks.

The letters GNU were a hack to ensure Dearheart's name would continue indefinitely. G meant passing on the message, N meant "not logged" and U meant it must be returned on reaching the end of the line.

Reddit wanted to honour Pratchett in a way that also marked his books

A thread called "GNU Terry Pratchett" was created as a way to keep Pratchett's name running actively through the internet, rather than relying on a passive archive of articles.

Reddit users had originally planned to keep the thread running indefinitely, but new rules meant a thread can only last for six months.

It was then decided to set up a new thread each six months instead, but then a user came up with GNU Terry Pratchett and people quickly started to post the term on the Reddit Discworld forum, and in tribute threads.

The GNU code was designed as a way to add Pratchett to the HTML code of websites.

Initially, this was limited to people who ran their own specific type of server, but developers soon posted ways of adding the code to different servers, apps, proxies, and even to mail servers.

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There is now even a plug-in for the popular blogging and website software, Wordpress.

Now GNU Terry Pratchett will run through the internet forever, underlining Pratchett's own line in Going Postal: "A man's not dead while his name's still spoken."