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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised with the bland and uninspiring names choosen by FLOSS projects.

Anyway, good idea of a project !

Anyone understands the difference with Apertus AXIOM ? https://www.apertus.org/fr/en

You should not be surprised. Choosing 'fun' names is subjective. This is a tool, not a disney ride. Not everything needs to trigger dopamine rushes and it's ok to have clear, straightforward names in software, seeing as naming things is hard.

Personally I don't want fun names, but I wish people used unique, writable, pronounceable names. Try to search for "camera" and see if you find this project. On the other hand, v4l2 is pretty unique. If all text editors are called "TextEditor", maybe the name says what it is, but the name is useless. For a company, you just use the company name ("Microsoft Word", assuming that the company name is unique enough), but for an open source project...

Your argument is one heck of a strawman. Why on earth would you use a search engine to search for "camera" and be disappointed that libcamera didn't make the front page of your results?

Searching for "lib camera", "libcamera", or "camera lib" returns this project as the top result.

Sorry I meant it as a general comment for project names, not for this one in particular. And it is just my preference: given that "names that say what it does" don't really help me discriminate projects in general, I feel like "unique names" would be better. And if, like many company, a ton of money will be put into infinite brainstorming sessions by people with a good salary, I feel like maybe just going for a fun, unique name would be cheaper and not less effective.

"Apple" does not return the fruit in the top results, but I wouldn't say it's a good name for a new project in 2022. Same for "word", I wouldn't advise you call your project like this, even if the top results are "Microsoft Word" and nothing related to the actual meaning of the word.

I come from an industry where everyone uses the same prefixes/suffixes (related to the industry) together with names that "mean something". As a result, it's never really unique, and the only way to differentiate them is to always name them together with the company name. There is one in particular where the company name says what their product does, and it is similar to another product. For that one I _always_ need to Google it and go check the geographical location of both companies, because that's how I differentiate them: the names (and in this case the company name) do not help me.

I love bland and uninspiring names. What's libcamera? A library for dealing with cameras, I'd wager. What's AXIOM? Not sure... My first guess would be a proof assistant.

It's also not just FOSS, Apple for instance has many ThingKits(HealthKit, UIKit) but also TextEdit.

100% agree! Contrast with "Pokemon or Big Data" https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

The same can be said about anything related to MLOps. The naming schemes are so out there but they all end up sounding similarly... generic. It's kind of weird really

I don’t, and here’s why: If libcamera turns out to be a bust, then we’ve burnt that name. Now the next library will have to be called something like libeyeopener, and I’ll have to spend years telling people “although libcamera sounds like the ‘official’ camera library, the one you actually want is libeyeopener.”

“Fanciful” names don’t squat on valuable namespace and allow different approaches to duke it out without one of them getting the advantage of sounding like the “official” one.

If the libs are called Barracuda and Seagull you'll have to spend years telling people "although you have heard of Barracuda, the lib you want to use now is Seagull", I don't see that as very different. People don't make library choices based on the name only, they search for what is recommended online and look at examples/features/etc.

I do concede that all else being equal people will gravitate towards the more "official" sounding library, but if all else's equal, it's not really an issue.

Even if that were to happen, it wouldn't be the first time the open source community had to find a name for something to differentiate it from previous efforts.

Choices like libname2, libname3, libname-ng and plenty of others have been used by projects before.

If anything the poor state of search on the internet is a problem.

Its not a true HN thread about a FLOSS project without gall towards the name.

I have to repost a comment: "I remember a friend of mine arguing prefixing names with g, q and k was a reason linux on the desktop failed. I asked "So, how do you explain the success of ipod, iphone, ipad and itunes?""

People complaining about influence of the name of a project on its success should publish unbiased statistics to base their arguments on.

Apple as creative names like. Mail, Pages, Numbers, Calendar, Photos... I actually think this is great for most users. What makes more sense for a user that knows very little about computers use an app called Mail to check the emails or one called Thunderbird.

The only place where this convenience fails is for google searches.

"Is Numbers a calculator? Or an accounting app maybe?"

"Is Calendar the one I just installed, or is it the one Apple is forcing me to use?"

"Wait, so there is an app called Mail that I cannot remove, but my e-mail app is called Thunderbird? Let me note that."

1) People will learn the name of the apps they use, it's not that hard 2) Not all browsers can be called "browser".

libcamera isn't firmware for cameras. It's a userspace framework for enabling and abstracting away the terribleness of v4l2 & quirky hardware.

Don't look at my project names[0], then...

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#here-on-github

Agreed. More examples :

- libpipi (why such a boring name for a library that I'm guessing helps you take a piss?)

- libcaca (why such a boring name for a library that helps you take a shit?)

- Thunar (what an utterly uninspired name for software that 100% accurately behaves like a Norse god)

- Flameshot (Another fire shooting application with a boring name)

- Zathura (I hate that from the name alone I can tell that I'm gonna be pulled into an intergalactic space adventure. Why not something random?)

On the upside, the name tells you what it is and does.

Well, not really. It deals with a portion of what you need to build a camera, so which portion exactly is it ? And now if someone else creates another FLOSS camera library / toolkit they're going to call it libcam and we'll all get confused about who's who

> And now if someone else creates another FLOSS camera library / toolkit they're going to call it libcam and we'll all get confused about who's who

You identified a problem with ALL names. If someone developing a new library in the same general area (library for cameras) chops three letters off the end of an existing library to name their project, that is the second project's fault, not the first project's.

Well you need to think about the whole thing before coming up with a name. I don't care about blaming people here

> I don't care about blaming people here

Says the person blaming the creators for their name.

I only said "I'm always surprised". I am wondering about this topic, and the replies are helpful

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