[huxpro]

The Lynx project was originally named independently without thinking this far ahead. Since so much code and so many users already rely on it, we decided to stick with the name rather than change it just for open-sourcing.

[DannyPage]

Open-sourcing is/was the perfect time to change it. Otherwise it might be even more painful if a name change is needed later.

[bangaladore]

And why exactly would a name change be needed later?

Names are just names, many people have the same names, and projects can too.

[giancarlostoro]

Every Go developer knows how awful a bad name can be. Just try to google anything Go related, you need to type "golang" instead.

[reactordev]

A go developer doesn’t Google go, they go to pkg.go.dev to get go’ing.

/s

[aaplok]

Plenty of people have the same name, but if you call your child Brad Pitt, it will be interpreted as a reference to the famous guy bearing that name, and nobody will believe it is a coincidence.

Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).

[bangaladore]

Bit misleading. The analogy is closer to naming your child "Genevieve" when another Genevieve exists in the school. Lynx is a fairly common and well understood word.

> Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).

This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.

[aaplok]

> This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.

I am not sure I agree with this argument. This gives a vibe of "make place for me, away with the old guard!"

What if someone called their program "vi" with the argument that noone uses vi anymore?

Besides, who decides what is niche and what isn't? Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?

Blaming the distros for already having software named like what you decide to call yours isn't terribly cooperative.

Figurative "you" of course, not meaning OP here.

[bangaladore]

You took my argument and basically butchered the main point.

Everyone and their brother knows what "vi" is. Many (presumably millions) use it.

How many people would know what Lynx is. My guess is very few.

> Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?

Its trivial to understand why this is a bad argument (appeal to emotion)

[michaelmior]

Generally agreed. I think unique names for projects are nice, but unless the projects have very similar goals, I think having the same name isn't really a big deal.

[nailer]

SEO.

[spl757]

$ apt-cache dump | grep '^Package' | awk '{print $2}' | wc -l && apt-cache dump | grep '^Package' | awk '{print $2}' | uniq | wc -l

152007

152007

You can call it lynx all day long, but it won't be lynx in the Ubuntu repositories as that name is taken, and as you can see above, there are no duplicates.

[sanxiyn]

Since it is a library, it won't be named lynx anyway even if there is no name collision. D3 is packaged as libjs-d3, for example.

[spl757]

Yeah that's true.

[Kwpolska]

Oh no!

Anyway...

[jaredwiener]

Try running NextJS on your NeXT