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It puzzles me a little when large companies adopt names that have reasonably wide recognition already in the free and open source world. For example, Microsoft
by jka 5y ago
It puzzles me a little when large companies adopt names that have reasonably wide recognition already in the free and open source world.
For example, Microsoft's operating system name "Vista" shadows the name of perhaps the longest-running open source software project in existence.
And Google's project name "Salsa" shadows the GitLab version control repository for Debian packages.
It's most likely pure coincidence, or perhaps imitation as a form of flattery; and probably also not infringing in any technical copyright or trademark sense.
Securing open source software will require disambiguation of software by package name. I think they could lead by example by disambiguating their own initiative names; that will be part of the problem space before too long (in other words, knowing more clearly what services and participants are involved in the overall ecosystem).
- Gigachad 5y agoThere aren’t enough simple and nice words for every project to have a unique one. It’s usually pretty easy to find what you want. Just search “salsa Debian”
- jka 5y agoMore-or-less agreed, yep, it's a tricky problem. To compare with technical solutions, I guess the options available are things like namespaces, lexical scoping, or (bleh) more verbose variable naming; perhaps something along those lines could be helpful.