[ndiddy]

> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.

If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.

[burnte]

And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.

[myrmidon]

Not necessarily.

The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).

[burnte]

I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.

"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.

If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.

[thayne]

> "It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So?

So it will take valuable developer time that might be better utilized to work on something else. And even if they do rename it, there isn't any guarantee that the other vendors would then agree to collaborate.

[scoopdewoop]

Technical procedural issues don't become "emotional reasons" because you hand-wave them away. This sounds like volunteering other peoples time.

[whateveracct]

now that's an emotional argument

[ffaccount2]

>"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So?

So there's no point in wasting time on this, if perceived problems are low or nonexistent. Current maintainers probably look at it from a technical pov "it's just a name, who cares"

[nine_k]

> it's just a name, who cares

This cannot be, naming things is one of the two canonical hard problems.

[technojamin]

I think it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. The maintainers sound like they're only considering the technical cost (and judging it not worth it) instead of factoring in the political consequences of keeping the same naming. I actually really respect those who value the technical over the political, but in a large-scale, public-facing project, some politics must be played.

It seems to me like you're viewing the playing of politics as a no-brainer, which is a very different mindset from a Linux contributor. I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.

[burnte]

No, I'm not saying the politics is a no brainer. I'm saying there is a logical barrier to the project succeeding, and it is the name. Other people refuse to work with it using the current name, people who would make it a much more useful product. Deciding it's not a TECHNICAL problem is an emotional decision, because you're not reframing it from what it is, a barrier to success, to something it's not, a non-issue. They're deciding not to engage with the hard problem.

[solarkraft]

The ones playing political games dressing them up as technical ones are the worst:

“My approach is technically correct and I won’t change it even though it causes issues down the line”. I’ve seen this a lot in the Gnome/Wayland world.

> I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.

I’m not a kernel developer and the projects I’ve worked on haven’t even been that big, but even there it was necessary to cater to multiple stakeholders and consider multiple viewpoints. I’d go as far as saying that software development in general gets pretty political pretty quickly, as soon as you depend on somebody else’s work or somebody else depends on yours. Every decision will impact somebody and different options will do so differently - these are political considerations.

I can’t imagine this being less of an issue in the kernel.

[zem]

it's not the exact opposite, saying that the technical aspects are more important than the political ones is an emotional stance, not a logical one.

[myrmidon]

Different people have different perspectives.

My point is that from a developers PoV, renaming is not an evident net-gain at all-- might be seen as pointless branding busywork that leeches ressources from "actual" problems.

That is not "being emotional", it's just different priorities.

[john_strinlai]

i am not sure why you would say that they are "emotional reasons".

comparing the cost (difficulty, complications, etc.) against the benefit of doing something before doing it seems quite logical.

[shermantanktop]

That’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example.

It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.

[nine_k]

Change is painful in general. But it may have a sufficient upside to withstand the pain.

[bandofthehawk]

It seems like it would be simple to just create a fork and archive the old repo. Add a note to the old repo, update a couple of the most important docs and links, and then worry about the rest later. It can be low hanging fruit for new contributors.

[KaiserPro]

Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.

[burnte]

Yes, I know, but that all just underscores what I said about it being emotional. Logically it's not only Wacom but for any tablet. It would do better with a new name as other competitors would help. But the emotional resistance to changing the name keeps those logical improvements form happening.

[__mharrison__]

Second hardest thing in CS besides cache invalidation and off by one errors....

[xenophonf]

Don't concurrency. forget about

[weaksauce]

just change the name to mocaW

[MomsAVoxell]

True nerds name things properly in the first place. The liberal use of -wacom throughout project names and repositories is a consequence of the Wacom itch being scratched - and then that scratch becoming the base upon which Wacoms' competitors can participate. A true nerd would've skipped including the brand in a directory name, in the first place .. I bet these drivers started off being written by graphics designers, not nerds.

[inigyou]

Yet name changes happen easily when legally forced. Wireshark, MariaDB, and LibreOffice.

[Onavo]

main vs master

[wiether]

The issue has always been with the reasons invoked to make the change

Otherwise it would have been smoother

[happymellon]

You didn't hear the foaming at the mouth shouting to rename master recordings, master documents, or dub over The Master from Dr. Who.

Considering how much effort we had to out into fixing pipelines because of hardcoded scripts, and the lack of good reason to do it its no surprise that it was scoffed at. White keyboard warriors needed to make a change, but couldn't do anything meaningful as it would require actually doing something.

At least this change makes sense.

[ChocolateGod]

I thought the purpose of the rename was to encourage these contributions that apparently weren't happening because of the branch name?

It certainly helped GNOME whom was one of the biggest proponents /s

[inigyou]

personally my default branch is called dominatrix, just to annoy the kind of person who argues about master

[egypturnash]

Do you call all your subsidiary branches “paypigs”?

[QuercusMax]

ugh, half the repos at work use main and half use master. Such a pain.

[nh23423fefe]

dei idiots dont care about outcomes only signalling

[QuercusMax]

Nah, I genuinely think "main" is a better name overall (it's shorter and clearer). What does "master" mean in a DVCS anyway?

I'm generally in favor of DEI, btw, so you can lose me with your bigotry.

[otikik]

mainster

[jrm4]

Preach. And it's a disease.

Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

[pmontra]

In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me.

It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.

[graemep]

It did stop it from being used in a multiple markets though. Fine is some places, not in others is not good branding, especially when one of the places its not fine in is the biggest and most influential market.

[ffaccount2]

Nobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects).

It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.

[jrm4]

I've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point.

To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?"

An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."

[joeld42]

Yep. I was an intern at Disney Feature Animation when GIMP first came out. It was really exciting, an alternative to Photoshop (which used to run on linux!) and our in-house painting tools. I pushed for artists to use it, but was told by management to stop mentioning it as "Disney could never use a tool called GIMP". Also that reaction from several artists (who were already tech-savvy, linux using folks in the exact target audience) so it wasn't just "corporate". TBH I think a lot of programmers do this intentionally to protect themselves from their little project ever becoming too mainstream.

[MomsAVoxell]

Its most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is ..

Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.

It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.

Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...

[chadgpt3]

I think it makes them own you - a little. You look subsidiary to Wacom.

[otikik]

Yes. It feels like the article was leading towards a reason for not doing that, but then suddenly it just ends.

[yk]

Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.

And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.