make-believe.org
Zaphod, my iPhod
Annoyingly resistant to tinkering, but nonetheless an extraordinary feat of engineering, and the closest thing you can get to an iPhone round these parts.
Joseph | 27 Sep 2007 | 3 comments
The naming of things (specifically: software)
I was a little scornful the other day of software companies who still use acronyms for their product titles.
There are actually many nomenclatural systems for software, and some of them are now highly codified. The most popular is still the TLA, which appeals to classical nerds in combining verbosity and pithiness as well as a guessing game. Its ubiquity is diminishing a little now, but it remains cherished by the current crop of enterprisey architects.
There was a brief and sparkling phase in the 1980s when the postfix "Star" was applied to some term that implicated your software's approximate domain. Star was superceded by an increasingly dull sequence of postfixes such as Express, Pro, Lite.
Open source software has a long and diverse history of nominal acrobatics. The proudest lineage is surely GNU, a trailblazing recursive TLA standing for GNU's Not Unix. You actually can't squeeze anything more saturated with nerdiness.
The grandaddy of the free software culture, GNU spawned a ring of orbiting projects that indicated their GNU-ishness by using the prefix "gn". One of the better known among these satellites is the Gnome desktop project (we can assume this is a splicing of GNU and Home — splicing and other less destructive portmanteau techniques are also very popular in software naming lore).
Now Gnome latterly developed a rival, called KDE (a semi-recursive TLA where the K once stood for Kool but now stands for nothing at all — quite sensibly, because Kool has been an unhappy product prefix over the years). These two projects have each formed their own satellite rings of compatible software, and since they both do exactly the same goddamn thing with a slightly different gloss*, there is an incredible amount of overlap in the functionality of their satellites. In order to distinguish them, the rock-fucking-solid convention of G.+ for Gnome apps and K.+ for KDE apps has emerged.
As a result, we see one of the most consistent examples of the contortion effect in software naming. This is where the normal name for the software package gets warped to fit the convention. Office becomes Koffice, Edit becomes Gedit. Et cetera.
In the old days it was all about X, but that's another story.
Open source is also a sanctuary for the software naming practice known as "riffing". Take, for example, the web browser from the KDE project. It's called Konqueror. Why? Because at the time of its development, the dominant browsers on the market were called Explorer and Navigator, respectively. The Konqueror developers were aiming high, I guess. Actually, the third most popular browser nowadays is a spiritual heir to Konqueror called Safari, again riffing on the same theme. The best piece of advice I'll give you in this article is that if you can't figure out why a software product is called something, look at the name of the market leader, then figure out the riff. That said, nobody knows why Opera is called Opera.**
But hang on, Navigator is dead now. And its replacement is called Firefox. WTF? Well this is another sad but not uncommon naming practice: the litigational trajectory. When Netscape Navigator finally lost the browser wars, it became the open source Mozilla project (I'm simplifying greatly here). After a few years of dithering around making Swiss Army knives, a couple of upstart kids forked off the Mozilla trunk to make a just-plain-web-browser, which they called Phoenix. The resurrection of the once great Navigator, you see? Phoenix was a massive surprise hit in the ravenous, mildly vicious community of Windows software early adopters. Before Mozilla had even started plotting out milestones, they received notification that their name was infringing some trademark or other. So they changed it to Firebird, but they forgot to do a Google search. So they got another C&D, and thus Firefox was born.***
Anyway. I've noticed that the latest software naming practice is to give your software the name you wanted to give your band when you were a teenager but you were too shit at the guitar/drums/singing et cetera. This is particularly common in the Mac software community (say, for a random example, the Delicious Monster employee's Aquatic Prime library — yep, it's happening to company names as well), where geeks still pretend to some semblance of kool cool. But it's spreading its wings rapidly. Microsoft is already doing it. Pretty soon IBM will be in on the act.
All this is by way of an introduction to the announcement of my latest software project, Snot. (I am, in so many ways, a product of early 90s grunge.) And thank gawd Kelly isn't a software developer, because I got no idea what purpose the Ram Lounge application would serve.
* This statement is mildly heretical.
** Probably there's a good reason that lots of people know, but I didn't look it up.
*** Yes I am aware that you can draw an alternative lineage extending Firefox from SeaMonkey, which in turn derives from ButtMonkey. Hush.
Joseph | 21 Sep 2007 | 0 comments
