This kind of feels like the people that were saying the package ‘node’ already existed, and therefore should not be replaced, since there were many people using it to do their aux audio input or something.

If it’s actually widely used then I’d have heard of it by now. My suspicion is that it’s widely used in a specific circle.

And, since about the mid-90s or so, "portmaster" was also the name of a series of hardware "appliances" (as we'd probably call them today) that were very widely used in the early days of the Internet [0].

--

[0]: http://portmasters.com

CTO of Safing here. Yes, this is rather unfortunate. There are also some more "portmaster" things around, which were partly mentioned in an older HN thread.

We thought about a rebrand, but it's just way to expensive right now, as we are still bootstrapping.

I also don't think that there is an immediate issue, as both application domains and presence on operating systems don't interfere. If you think otherwise, please share your thoughts!

They don’t even support FreeBSD. Its like saying United chemicals had name collision with United Airlines.

Correct, "portmaster" and "mergemaster" are widely used.