[Freeipmi-devel] Re: naming conflict

[Anand Babu]

,----[ Axel Liljencrantz <address@hidden> ]
| On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Anand Babu wrote:
| 
| > I recently came across your "fish" (friendly interactive shell)
| > project. Our GNU FreeIPMI project has a shell called "fish"
| > (FreeIpmi SHell) too. GNU FreeIPMI is already a GNU project. Would
| > you consider changing your project name. You may also submit your
| > project as GNU Project and rename your binary to "gnufish" or
| > "gfish" if you like.
| 
| Oh dear, this is bad news. I'd never heard of FreeIpmi before today.
| When I first chose the name fish for my shell, about three or four
| years ago, I did a web search for the name fish, and I could not
| find any free software projects with the same name. Before I made
| the first public release of fish early this year, I made another
| search of Google, Sourceforge, Freshmeat, etc, and while there where
| a few projects called fish, none of them seemed serious. It seems
| the FreeIPMI shell somehow flies below the radar.
| 
| I'm not too thrilled by the idea of changing the name of my shell,
| for the following reasons:
| 
| * Looking at FreeIPMI, it seems the the FreeIPMI shell is a very
| different program from the friendly interactive shell, so I don't
| think the risk of confusion is very high.
| 
| * The friendly interactive shell is already in Debian unstable under
| the name fish, and several thousand people have downloaded it from
| my site. A namechange might lead to a lot of confusion and headache
| for my users.
| 
| * I already have fish registered at sourceforge and at freshmeat,
| there is a Wikipedia entry for fish, etc. The time and effort to
| change all these things is huge, and I do not have the time. There
| are also articles about fish in places such as Linux Weekly News
| (lwn.net) that I can't change myself, mening they might point users
| to the wrong place.
| 
| * There are several other free software projects also called fish,
| as well as a KDE kio slave. Renaming my shell won't make your fish
| have a unique name.
| 
| * I like the name fish, I do not like the names gfish, gnufish or
| any other similar names.
| 
| I'm not sure what should be done about this situation, but I'm not
| at all thrilled about the idea of changing the name of my project.
`----

Alright, I will think about renaming our 'fish' to 'ipmi-fish' :(

-- 
Anand Babu 
GPG Key ID: 0x62E15A31
Personal Blog  [http://freedom.freeshell.org]
The GNU Operating System [http://www.gnu.org]