An "edgy" name can get you in real trouble. The brilliant programmer Dan Farmer [1] who developed the security tool that he named SATAN [2] was fired from his job when he published his program. If you haven't heard of SATAN, it was the most important network security analysis tool in the late 1990s.
I feel certain that the name was the critical factor that made his company so nervous. For a while he had two different names for the program, SATAN and SANTA, to try and reduce the stigma, but it didn't work.
Artists and musicians can get away with invoking (haha) such names for effect. But tech despite its abandonment of the suit is still pretty straight laced and Ivy League at heart and interfaces with a high corporate and financial world that is even more so.
It's okay if your audience is strictly other tech people, but this is built for general use.
> The Web site Serge had used (which has the word “subversion” in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious.
Absolutely horrible choice of a name. There's so much BS regarding the use of encryption and it keeps coming up in criminal cases, that normal folks are going to avoid using a think that might somehow be linked with a felony.
I really dislike this attitude. Sure, you can change the name (or do whatever you want) by forking, but what would that really achieve? Forking for a reason like this without a conversation isn't polite, nor will it likely achieve the best outcome.
What it could achieve is a clone that simply replaces the names and requires very little maintenance. If the community agrees and adopts, then politeness be damned.
Edit: To put the converse: If it's a shitty idea, then no one will use it and it didn't matter that you were polite anyways.
To be fair, this did happen with GCC. But everyone hated everyone else for years as a result. Forking fractures a community -- for something as trivial as this it isn't worth it. But it is worth DoSing the maintainer until they realise that making an encryption program called "Felony" is a brain-dead idea.
Yeah, hostile forks for minor reasons go over real well in the open source community. Don't welcome people to a community you obviously don't have much experience in please!
That doesn't solve the problem. Now your problem is you use "X" and nobody knows what that is unless you're going to say "it's a fork of Felony," which puts you back at square one.
You might as well just be offering to not refer to it at all by any name.
I feel certain that the name was the critical factor that made his company so nervous. For a while he had two different names for the program, SATAN and SANTA, to try and reduce the stigma, but it didn't work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Farmer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...