November 16th, 2005
Don't steal the open source brand
Back in the 1980s I became angry over a product called Mirror. It was a clone of Crosstalk, a communications program, and if you’re old enough to remember Crosstalk take several hundred gray hairs out of petty cash.
Crosstalk was then at Version 3.6. So Version 1.0 of Mirror was listed as Version 3.6.
The point is it’s wrong to misappropriate an established process or image. It just makes you look stupid.
So paint a stupid button on the former Pajamas Media (cute name), which officially launched today under the name (wait for it) Open Source Media. The company had a nice Web address, but paid up for a new one — OSM.Org.
That address only compounds the problem for me. This is a company, not an organization. Top level domain names were once supposed to mean something. (If you recall when that was true, pull out a few hundred hairs and put them in the petty cash drawer.)
What it all says to me is, we don’t have to play by the rules of the Internet, we’ll roll it. And that trick never works.
The point is there is a lot of needless stupidity and arrogance here, and given that their beat is politics this is bound to be pointed-out. It’s wasteful. And don’t they know that good names cost nothing ? Google, Amazon, and eBay could have easily clued them in on that one.
You make the name, the name doesn’t make you.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 11/16/05
