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Comment by mhuffman | Hacker News Reader

Useful project. Name that no reasonable company would allow IT department to use. 10 out of 10! It worked for CockroachDB. I hope it turns into a unicorn and I'm not joking about that.

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I can't remember what the package was, but when I was working for "large bank", one of the npm dependencies we wanted to use had a licence file that just said 'Do whatever the fuck you want'.

Legal came back saying that it was "highly unorthodox, but approved for use"

That’s amazing. I’d really like to steal that, but not being a lawyer, I’m not sure how viable it is as an actual license.

FSF has approved it, OSI has not. Make of that what you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Notes from OSI rejection board meeting

> It's no different from dedication to the public domain.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL#cite_note-osi-2

I believe people chose to pay Adobe subscriptions simply to avoid explaining the acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program in meetings.

I'm going to have to challenge you on this one. I'm not great lover of Photoshop, and GIMP does have an unfortunate name, but it is an alternative to Photoshop in the same way Gentoo is an alternative to Mac OS, you're not wrong but...

I have never worked at or heard of a company caring about the names of software, at most it's been a bit of a chuckle. Best guess is being concerned about software names is a super conservative culture thing.

Perhaps not directly in a review.

Names can be troublesome though, badly named products get caught in spam filters, or blocked in some firewall blacklist.

I do believe you, but be honest, both of us could come up with an easy half-dozen names for software that if spoken out loud at work or triggered a filter on the network at the office would have someone explaining to HR what the hell is going on.

The cockroachDB thing, was that intentional or just incidental?

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