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.
> It may be a braindead idea but it's their idea. If you don't like it, fork it.
Because that's how PR works. The problem is that it's a publicity problem, not a technical problem. Technical problems are solved by forks, but publicity problems have to be solved by the community.
> But don't complain because someone wrote some software and kindly published it for all to use for free.
And then decided to give it a name that actively bombards the crypto community's efforts to bring encryption to the masses. Sure, it's free software and that's fine. But it's free software that will cause a PR nightmare for no good reason. "Hackers and terrorists are using a new app called 'Felony' to steal your money and freedom." -- That's the headline here.
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.