On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 02:05:01PM +0000, Martyn Taylor wrote: > <winge> > > Gents, > > I know we all had a bit of fun coming up with weird and wonderful > names when we were looking to rename IME (or now Tim). > > But seriously... are we actually going to call our projects things > like Gablestablerfahrer, WingedMonkey and alike? I'm all for > avoiding boring names like IME and EVM (no offence MIQ) but surely > there is some middle ground to be had here? We should at least make > an effort to name our projects to roughly describe what they actually > do?
I'm not necessarily advocating for Gabelstaplerfahrer right at this point; I think naming in premature. But I don't really think we should preemptively rule it out, either. That said, I don't think that naming projects after what they do is really that common. "Linux" doesn't communicate "open-source operating system," and someone unfamiliar could just as easily think it was a disinfectant. A company named "Red Hat" is more apt to make, well, hats. Even "McDonald's" doesn't communicate food -- it might as well be a Scottish rifle manufacturer if you just go by the name. And then there's a whole host of companies with ridiculous names that we've come to accept. Yahoo? Zynga? Red Hat? I think there's an even broader category of fun/eccentric names in open source software. Katello has a component called 'thumbslug'. Fedora's named releases Tettnang, Moonshine, Werewolf, Beefy Miracle, Spherical Cow, etc. Some of thin's release names have been obscene[1]. So, I really want our project to be taken seriously, but I don't see a name like Gabelstaplerfahrer or Winged Monkey as precluding that. (In fact, I've already grown used to Winged Monkey as a serious project with a memorable logo.) I'm not really arguing in this email that we _should_ name our cloud broker Gabelstaplerfahrer. I'm just saying -- when it comes time to name things, let's brainstorm names and then vote on them, rather than preemptively shooting down names. I'd much rather work on Gabelstaplerfahrer than on Enterprise Cloud Broker Platinum Edition Premium. -- Matt [1] https://github.com/macournoyer/thin/blob/master/CHANGELOG
