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Complaints about names tend to provide little in the way of insightful feedback. Changing the name won’t move the project forward very much if at all. Mostly it’s a distraction. Based on evidence of multiple successful projects named ‘helm’ listed, there’s a good chance it’s a good enough name.

It's also part of a ship and the word has been in use for more than 8 centuries: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/helm

Who's heard of those? Should a project have a monopoly on such a generic word from the dictionary?

Helm for Kubernetes is pretty huge ~17k stars on GitHub and nearing an industry standard.

That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if there was a line of blenders called Raspberry Pi, and a furniture line called Raspberry Pi, shoes branded as Raspberry Pi, a laptop model called Raspberry Pi (unrelated to Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi), etc. It's just confusing.

Raspberry Pi is a really unnatural combination of words. Helm is a pretty average noun.

That's exactly why it's a poor choice for a product name. It's "greedy" to claim generic words for your products. It works for the likes of FAANGs with stuff like "Google groups", but at least they're coupling it with their brand. To just come out and call your product "Sink" for example, with no qualifiers, is foolish and bordering on unethical.

This is a fine comment. But could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Among emacs users, the helm completion framework is also very popular.

Among FP enthusiasts, the helm FRP engine is pretty interesting, too.

So, at least the first 3 I mentioned are pretty well known in their respective communities.

The last one is from the last Show HN I saw for a Helm project.

Helm could be considered almost industry standard tooling for k8s users these days... At least in my circle, when the world helm is used it's as obvious what is mean as when 'apt' or 'yum' is mentioned...

I use two of those helms every day.

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