[luluganeta]

The opposite exercise, treating proprietary software naming in such an un-generous way, is pretty easy too:

- Fireworks: you'll make bitmaps so good they'll blow up in colors?

- Dreamweaver: you can weave... dreams? I get the 90s web enthusiasm but come on

- Illustrator: there's bitmap illustration and vector illustration; Illustrator focuses on the latter, so good job on picking the wrong word in "vector illustration"

- InDesign: this name is a marketing dept playing it safe to a point that only a beige puddle of non-meaning remains

- GoLive: crappy subscription 1995 online service

- ColdFusion: lol

I'd love to see people taking such critical takes into the bigger guys for once. Especially because they have marketing departments. F/LOSS project naming reflects their often-personal origins and ways of expressing identity. Some do sound clunky, but give me the clumsy Inkscape any day (the "ksk" is hard to get used to, but you forget quickly) than any of the sad corporate names above.

I'm being snarkier that warranted, but man i'm crestfallen with all the unbridled hate on free software project naming around here.

[anonred]

All of the examples you gave are either real words or composites of real words, making them 10-100x more memorable and brandable than “Kdenlive.”

I agree that expectations should be different for FOSS, but the bar is literally at “pick one or two short + commonly used words and mush them together”…

[luluganeta]

You're right, but I don't think memorability and brandability are universal priorities that F/LOSS projects must also be measured from. Sure they can go for that (and many do), but it's unfair to hold them to that very specific standard.

I'm reminded of Debian Linux and its origins (the combination of names of the OS author and his partner). Ended up being pretty memorable, and brand-wise it works. And yet the motivations behind Debian's naming were unusually human for a software world full of empty buzznames.

[bee_rider]

What is the generous reading of kdenlive?

Just to be clear, from me at least, this isn’t intended as unbridled hate. The names are bad. So what? Anyone who’s named a software project knows it is an annoying task. And it isn’t very important. I think open source names are often somewhat sarcastic or lampshade-y, and I like it that way.

Inkscape is a great name, IMO.

[luluganeta]

I'll take it, not much to praise. It reads well (kayden live) unlike other names I have to grudgingly pronounce (postgresql, qjackctl, systemctl come to mind).

But cheers, now I see I was reactive towards a generalised view of your point; I now understand where you're coming from, I'm with you there.