At Aaron's suggestion, I am opening a separate thread on this subject. On Jan 6, 2011, at 11:16 AM, Aaron McCaleb wrote:
> (Although it _does_ beg the question: _Why_ is it a tender subject? > But if anyone else wants to discuss it [ I really don't ]...then they > should probably start a new thread.) Naming has always been a problem in this space. What the hell is USENIX? Rob Kolstad always said that, by far, the toughest job he ever had was explaining why SAGE had nothing to do with the Screen Actors Guild, SAGE Software, SAGE Publications, or any of the various other uses of the name. Looking to other examples, the naming of things has been a problem throughout all of human history. There's the story about the Chevy Nova and how poorly that sold in spanish-speaking countries (where "no va" means "no go"), although that has been discredited (see <http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp>). For further humor on this subject, contemplate the translation of the name "Coca-Cola" into Mandarin Chinese, and ask yourself if "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is a name that you would want to choose (see <http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp>). For more humor in naming, see <http://www.snopes.com/autos/pinkslip/datsun.asp>. Plenty of other blogs, articles, RFCs, have been written on such subjects (see <http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2002/10/on_the_naming_of_things.html>, <hhttp://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/it-stack-overflow-update-naming-is-hard/>, <http://haacked.com/archive/2010/10/22/naming-is-hard.aspx>, <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html>, <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2100.html>, and so on). Naming is hard. Naming is really, really hard. So why should the situation for LOPSA be any different? Naming in the modern world is made even harder by the need/desire to capture a memorable and short domain name. There's a good post on this subject at <http://www.outercurve.org/Blogs/EntryId/21/The-Naming-Game-Things-to-consider-when-naming-an-open-source-project>. The people who were involved in founding LOPSA went through all the right procedures. If you can go through all the right procedures, spend all the thousands of dollars (or equivalent time & effort) it takes to do all the legwork, and come up with a better name, with trademark, domain name, etc... all intact and then sign over all that intellectual property to LOPSA, I still don't think that anyone would be interested. Does that answer the question? -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
