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Free software has some glib naming conventions
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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And this really exposes a major challenge with FOSS.
Names have meaning - it's why Office is called Office.
This gnu naming isn't much of an issue, because this is stuff only technical folks handle. But if we want end-users to embrace things, we need meaningful names - meaningful to them.
Whenever I tell my friends or family to install Jellyfin so they can access my media, the look on their face says it all.
MediaMonkey - alright, I get it (yea, not FOSS)
Plex? OK, if someone then says "think MultiPlex Theaters", you get it. (Also not FOSS)
Jellyfin? What is that? Jam on a sharkfin?
These work really well:
Resilio SYNC (Yeah, not FOSS, but the name makes sense)
SyncThing (FOSS)
FolderSync (not FOSS)
Notice a trend here?
I have a printed spreadsheet for all the software I use - if I haven't touched a service for a couple months, I'll forget the meaningless name.
Counterarguments:
All wellknown programs or services where the name has no relation to the purpose.
These are all major commercial services that can afford advertising or are already more than established. Most FOSS doesn’t have these perks.
I don't even necessarily disagree, but I think that position is unfalsifiable because if the example is a highly popular program then "that doesn't count because it's big", and if it has a small user base then "of course it's small, it has a shitty name".
Fair enough. But all of these are heavily advertised.
This.
Nobody's going to forget the name of the browser they use every single day. But if it's some niche tool that I have to look up every time I use it once every few years, that's more difficult.
Compared to how Microsoft names things, FOSS naming is harmless on average.
Think of them naming the gaming app on Windows PCs "Xbox", or the distinction between "VS Code" and "Visual Studio Code", or "edit" (msedit), etc etc
Outlook (new) classic new new final (7). Teams (personal). Multiple products with wildly different appreance and somewhat different functionality. And then the whole 365-environment naming, starting from the platform itself.
I've always despised their naming schemes. I always thought I'd they ever started a car company they'd name their vehicle make as "car".
At least Xbox is original but now I'm sitting here wondering if they bought it off a small outfit
I mean you kind of break your point with Plex. I have no clue what MultiPlex theaters are, but I do know what jellyfin is. Lots of names have no meaning behind them, even for very popular things.
If they had said cineplex would that have been more meaningful?
Sure but only because I’m old enough to understand that. It still would have zero meaning for anyone under 25-30. Like someone else said, multiplex only makes sense if you’re over 40 (which I’m not). So literally in 10 years you can go through two different naming conventions and have literally the next generation not know what you are talking about
Only choosing meaningful names really doesn’t work anymore. Stuff moves too fast, language moves too fast, and things change constantly.
At least over here, Cineplexx is a really big movie theatre corporation. That makes it easy to understand what Plex is about.
It's about PMMA sheeting (aka plexiglass), right?
Where is “over here”?
thanks
So back in the earlier days of cinema, you'd go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term "multiplex" started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now
You went on all this rant and forgot the og?
GIMP is an acronym for what's arguably the most descriptive name possible: GNU Image Manipulation Program.
But the acronym totally destroys the understandability of the program name and instead is understood as "an unpleasant or stupid person" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gimp).
If you look at similar commercial software you get names like MS Paint, Photoshop or Lightroom.
They should have stuck with "GNU Image", "GNU Photo" or maybe "GNU PhotoEdit".
When I teach old people how to use GIMP, we all laugh at the name, I explain what it stands for, and then they don't forget it.
This is what confused me about OP, because I think of this as the application (ie program, or tool) not the library. So to put the name of the tool back into a library, seems backwards.
It's called Jellyfin because "streaming" is something water does,
The rest of it is diffcult to know for sure but fins guide you and jelly is flexible, and Jellyfin is a fork of Emby - so maybe they were going with "[e]N comes after [e]M alphabetically?"
Here's where the service was named:
https://github.com/joshuaboniface/Emby/issues/2
Good explanation. I'd say that's still a lot of processing for our noggins to quickly adapt to a framework of mind to comprehend all that to make sense of it.
I still like the name and it does make since after it's all spelled out.
Agreed on all counts.
SeaShell sounds like it’s a zsh plugin tbh.
Nah, AI almost always gives the most anodyne, bland, wet-fart name ideas, because all it can think of is stuff that's already been thought of.
The only real use cases for AI are things that computers are good at: pattern recognition in large datasets, search, translation, sentiment analysis, natural language processing and synthesis, that sort of thing. When you can bring those strengths to bear on the problem you're in business. Sometimes a neural network is the right choice; more often (at least right now) you can do as well or better with a more "dumb" algorithm. Even when a neural network is the right choice (such as when you have a non-deterministic problem), using a small one selectively is almost always a better option than feeding the entire thing to a gigantic model.
Legitimate use cases for LLMs (beyond simple toys) are remarkably niche at the moment.