The author's previous iteration of a library for multi-user text editing was called libobby, so that it'd be manually linked with -lobby. It might have been named some time after reading about libiberty and the like. Naturally, the Gtk GUI app had to have a G prepended to that, and the name was kept even though libobby was dropped in favor of a new, C-based library implementing a more complete algorithm with a slightly less gimmicky name.
Maybe globby would have been a better call...