Stephen Lau wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 12:41:47PM -0600, Bonnie Corwin wrote:
>
>> Descriptive names are best from a trademark perspective. But also from
>> a perspective of inclusiveness. People on various OpenSolaris mail
>> aliases have commented in the past that descriptive names help people
>> understand what is happening in the community. 'Decorative' names are
>> hard to track and can obscure the technology they represent - to the
>> point of potentially being a barrier to entry.
>>
>
> This is all true... but one of the fundamental true-isms of engineers is
> that we like to have whizzy cool project names.
>
Huh. I got hired to work on a project that, for now, is called Surya
II. If anyone here can describe what this project is, without some kind
of prescient knowledge, I'd be amazed.
We have projects like "FireEngine", "Crossbow", "Clearview", "Brussels",
"Surya", and "Nemo" in the networking group. Some of these you probably
know, but some of them you probably don't. And figuring out what any of
them means (or even their existence) may be non-trivial without inside
knowledge.
Much better, IMO, would have been names like:
"TCP/IP Stack Rewrite", "Network Virtualization", "Network Softmac
Layer", "NIC Tunables API", "Route Lookup Optimization", and "GLDv3".
By comparison we also have NWAM (network auto-magic) which is really
descriptive and that is really helpful. I think you can come up with
cool names (or acronyms at least) without resorting to decorative tags.
(You then would have had acronyms or short forms like: "TISR" ...
pronounce "teaser"?... "NV" or "netvirt", "softmac", "nictune", "rlo"...
pronounce "rollo"?, and "GLDv3".)
-- Garrett
