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Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 18:10:58 -0800
To: legal-discuss@apache.org
From: Ken Krugler <kkrugler_lists@transpac.com>
Subject: Re: Dead project names
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

FWIW, my input on the project name discussion stems for our 
experience at Krugle while dealing with many projects (> 100K) for 
our code and project index.

This doesn't have anything to do with brand awareness, which seems to 
be the major point of contention, but is hopefully still of value.

* Having duplicate names was very confusing for our users. Typically 
when they were searching on a project, they didn't know much about it 
(that's why they needed a search engine). So they lacked much of the 
context that's known by an existing user/contributor.

* There are several different categories of duplicate names that 
occur. One is when a project migrates between hosting sites, for 
example when Nutch moved from SourceForge to Apache. SF.net has (or 
at least had) an unfortunate policy of not removing information about 
such projects, so this leaves a vapor trail of out-of-date project 
homes.

* For a different example, see http://blog.krugle.com/?p=68 - this 
includes the case of projects setting up a "billboard" site at a 
hoster, but the bulk of the project is located elsewhere.

* In the case of SF.net projects, I'm wondering if they would or 
could ever claim any rights over a project name, even after they 
move. I assume not, but this discussion about the management of 
project names made me think about it.

* We wound up de-duping project names by adding the hoster name, as 
in SourceForge xxx vs. Apache xxx. Which helped, but didn't make it 
obvious when the xxx project was just older, versus something very 
different.

* There was discussion several years ago between Google, SF.net and 
Krugle about creating a project name registry to try to reduce name 
confusion. But it never got to critical mass.

-- Ken
-- 
Ken Krugler
+1 530-210-6378

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