Diego Basch

Not too long ago I spent some time thinking of a name for an open-source project. I brainstormed with other people and we discarded several ideas because of the following reasons:

• too long
• not very original
• ambiguous or unclear pronunciation
• domain name unavailable
• not too relevant to the project

We finally decided on a name, after long deliberations. A few days later I decided to take a look at the most successful projects in terms of number of downloads on Sourceforge. Here are the top 15 as of this posting:

1 eMule
2 Azureus
3 Ares Galaxy
4 BitTorrent
5 DC++
6 Shareaza
7 GTK+ and The GIMP installers for Windows
8 7-Zip
9 VirtualDub
10 Audacity
11 CDex
12 FileZilla
13 eMule Plus
14 guliverkli
15 Pidgin

Shareaza? guliverkly? Evidently there are more important factors that influence the success of these projects. I wonder what other types of entities are similar in this respect. Clearly this is also true for companies. Near the end of the last century, when I used to work for a company called Inktomi (whose name few people could pronounce correctly, and which had a very obscure meaning with little relation to search engines), we used to learn of a new startup with an “interesting” name pretty much every day. I remember that I learned about two companies around the same time. The first one, whose name I liked, had a short name that perfectly fit what the company did: eMusic. The second one, I didn’t like very much, as it was meaningless and misspelled: Google.