[clue-talk] [ANN] Bantam: a lightweight file manager for X11

[Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier]

On 5/2/05, Matt Gushee <mgushee at havenrock.com> wrote:
> Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> > Matt Gushee wrote:
> >
> >>[*] Well, I guess that one is a real African word, but I still say its
> >>    usage by a British software company is pretentious.
> >
> > The distro was founded by Mark Shuttleworth's company Canonical.
> > Shuttleworth was born in Africa, so it's probably not so pretentious as
> > you suggest.
> 
> Okay, that makes me feel better about the name Ubuntu. Still, I think
> the larger point remains that there are a lot of commercial concerns
> that don't care much about the meaning or implications or heritage of
> the words they use, as long as they draw customers. And, I guess there's
> a difference between reckless borrowing of foreign words (as I thought
> Ubuntu might be) and making them up out of thin air (Avaya, anyone? or
> Agilent? or anything ending with -ent?); still, both seem to me
> symptomatic of a moral vacuum in contemporary capitalism, in which
> companies have no real purpose except to grow. So of course I try to
> avoid being like that.

Well... there are a couple of ways to look at that. On the one hand, I
agree that there's a definite moral vacuum with the way companies
behave and I've been on about that for years and years. We're
violently in agreement there.

However, I'm not sure I would condemn the practice of picking a name
out of thin air - often, that's the only way to be sure that some
other company won't come and sue you for trademark infringement. For
examples of cautionary tales of trademark infringement, see "Lindows"
and "Mandrake Linux" - sued by Microsoft and Hearst Holdings,
respectively. Both companies threw in the towel eventually. Can't say
I care much for either of the new names either ("Linspire" and
"Mandriva") but there's little chance of conflicting with other
existing companies.

Actually, come to think of it, there's even been some in-fighting
between open source projects as a result of naming - remember the
ruckus over Firebird? (And this was after the Moz folks had to change
it from Phoenix to avoid naming conflicts.)

If the worst thing that corporations did was pick names out of thin
air, or a foreign dictionary, I think we'd be in quite good shape.

Best, 

Zonker
-- 
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier
xonker at gmail.com
"Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy
to state I finally won out over it." ~ Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"