Re: GNOME Games source name

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 03:10:59PM +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> If you want an application to be
> renamed, you'd better make sure that you can actually come up with a
> good name, and argue why it is an insurmountable problem to call the
> package "gnome-games-app" or similar in your distribution.
>
> gnome-games has been called gnome-games for 2 years. It uses the gnome-
> games list for communication, it uses the gnome-games bugzilla, it uses
> the gnome-games git repo.

gnome-games is not hosted on gnome.org since a long time, the project
has moved from GitHub to gnome.org recently. I already talked to Adrien
about the naming problem well before it was hosted on gnome.org.

Is the gnome-games mailing list also for the other games in GNOME? If
not, the name is misleading. The same for the bugzilla product. Users
will start filing bugs on gnome-games because, hey, that's what they
installed on their system.

Personally, when I develop a new software, I make sure the name that I
choose isn't yet used or at least not widely used in the same domain. To
have good results in a search engine, and find it easily in a package
manager. That's just common sense but I'm sure you can find it written
somewhere in a list of good practices when writing free software. For
example:
http://producingoss.com/en/getting-started.html#choosing-a-name

which is a recommended reading from the GNOME programming guidelines:
https://developer.gnome.org/programming-guidelines/stable/additional-materials.html.en

So in the first link you can read:

        “Is not the same as some other project's name, and does not
infringe on any trademarks. This is just good manners, as well as good
legal sense. You don't want to create identity confusion. It's hard
enough to keep track of everything that's available on the Net already,
without different things having the same name.”

(side note, it's a bit ironic to see gnome.org as an example a bit below
on the same page)

Btw Michael Catanzaro is a member of the release team. In GNOME module
maintainers have a lot of freedom, but maybe it is a good idea to know
the opinion of the release team, since it's the team responsible for
what GNOME ships. gnome-games (the new one) is not part of GNOME core
though.

--
Sébastien