Honest to gods, this conversation happened today, and it may have cost me a job opportunity. The customer was super impressed with my menu design and animation, and wanted to know who we got it from. When I said I did it, their face lit up! Too bad as soon as i said GIMP, they weren’t interested anymore. Has anyone else experienced this? What do you say in similar situations?
The first time I heard the name I thought “Why would you admit, in the name, that your software is gimped?”
Naming stuff is a significant problem in the open-source community (not to say closed source has a monopoly on good names, bad names seems to be a thing these days).
Thing is if OSS wants to compete, having a meaningful name will go a long way to getting regular users in board.
That’s the whole point though: FOSS software originally doesn’t want to compete. There’s no point in maximizing market share when you give away your software for free.
That’s why the devs call it Gimp, Freax, Gnu, Slackware or the Kool Desktop Environment. They’re hobbyist projects by nature, and got big because they’re useful, not due to marketing. And that’s what I love about them.
I wish more software (and products in general) were made and named like that.
Btw, Slackware is a reference to the Church of the SubGenius, which is quite anti-mainstream.
And the name was specifically chosen to keep people from taking the project too seriously.
Same with Freax, which was renamed to Linux by Ari Lemmke when he uploaded it, without consulting Linus Torwalds first.
I wouldn’t quite agree with this, though: in Stallman’s worldview, all software should be free and open-source.
A coworker of mine likes to say that there are three major problems in software development: naming things and off-by-one errors.
Cache invalidation was also included in the original quote.
5 major problems in software dev. :
1- naming things
2- [object Object]
3- Cache invalidation
4- off-by-one errors
I mean “Chrome” “Excel” “Outlook” “Slack” “Jira” “Acrobat” aren’t exactly meaningful names, but have become recognized brands.
if you didn’t know what they did you wouldn’t be able to guess from the name.
Software naming is usually depends on original maintainer language.
I’ve seen people claiming “weird software name” while it’s just good name in another language. Like it could be Hindi, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and so on.
Forcing non-Western developer to make “English-friendly” name seems anti-inclusive.
It’s 21st century. English monoliguist also have to tolerate language accross the world, not just expecting non-English speaker to tolarate them.
The hacker culture, from which the modern OSS community stems (‘hacker’ in the original programming meaning), is specifically rather anti-corporate and opposed to seeing software as a product to sell, instead of DIY tools shared between enthusiasts.
I hate when the name is just a common word, which makes searching for any information almost impossible.