This name is a direct link to the person, and he should not be immortalised like that. But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names.
Names typically have power when we only associate them with a single thing. If we have many things with similar names then one of them being terrible, no good, or awful does not directly come to mind when the word arises.
They found people named "Bomb, war, Göbbels, Speer, Keitel, Heß, Bormann, Eichmann" to run for Parliament.
Neither "commonly known", nor "evil"?
And GIMP. Some people just work so hard to get offended by an acronym that happens to also be an almost-unknown slang, that they created a fork called Glimpse.
That project declares that the name alone prevented adoption by thousands of companies and universities. If this is true, we should expect Glimpse adoption to skyrocket immediately.
That's nothing compared to German law: You won't see a single license plate there that has the numbers 18, 28 or 88 on it. Although numbers like 318 or 288 would be fine ...
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%...
For example, DBX-2399 or something.
Anyway, apparently they just rotate through the first triplet in a completely mechnical fashion... so you go from DBX to DBY to DBZ to DCA, yadda, yadda...
Logical consequence? At some point, license plates were made that started with WTF. And of course somebody took offense, called the DMV and complained, and it caused a big brouhaha. I'm thinking "are you freaking kidding me?" Talk about a "WTF moment".
https://www.wxii12.com/article/potentially-offensive-license...
Wikipedia tells me that 88 is a code number for "Heil Hitler".
But what is the significance of 18 or 28?
18 Adolf Hitler
28 Blood and Honour
Same as with 88, the numbers represent the position in the alphabet.
As those things go, 14/88 is a relatively common dog whistle.
Perhaps where you live.
Where I do, it's easily the most common slur for people with physical disabilities, and it's considered very offensive. I do consciously avoid using or talking about GIMP at the office, using it only when I'm working from home instead, specifically to avoid offending coworkers. This isn't me working hard at getting offended; it's me putting a minimum of effort into not upsetting my colleagues.
The folks who run GIMP are absolutely free to keep the name. But I think it would only be mature of them, and fans of the software, too, to be understanding of how others will perceive it, and not get defensive about the name adversely impacting the app's popularity.
Like, because they’re repulsed by cockroaches?
But with this name there is a 0.1% chance in any enterprise setting that managers would accept usage of such a DB. At least as long as it's not as mainstream as maybe Redis or MongoDB. (If something is popular enough, the name is to be accepted)
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/
Didn't seem to get in it's way too much.
If I ever get around to releasing any of my own little projects they will have deliberately slightly offensive names to take advantage of this as a user filtering property. If at some point I want the difficult & demanding sort of user who is going to take issue with a project name, I can rename at that time. (of course if a project is intended to be breadwinner that may be a poor strategy!).
Cockroachdb sounds really intriguing to me, enough that I checked their website and read a few posts. First thought that came to mind when hearing it was that the db might have something to do based on resilience and replication like a cockroach.