Ekiga 2.0 Released

Some Anonymous Coward writes "After about one year of development the former GnomeMeeting team has released Ekiga. Ekiga is the successor of the popular GnomeMeeting. Ekiga calls itself the very "first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP". Ekiga is based on the h323/sip codebase, provided by the openh323 project. Also introduced with this release is ekiga.net, a platform to provide the community with free sip addresses."

Comments

Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?

[foxtrot]

I might have been able to guess what GnomeMeeting did. I would have guessed that it was perhaps a collaborative whiteboard tool, perhaps with a dose of voice-chat built in. I'd bet it worked in Gnome.

I would have no bloody clue what an Ekiga is if the article hadn't mentioned it was the successor to GnomeMeeting. I'm sure it means something really appropriate in Sanskrit or something. How very clever.

And so, another project winds up with a useless name and they get to wonder why nobody uses their product, because folks see "Ekiga" and have no idea that it does exactly what they need, where GnomeMeeting might've hinted that at least.

-F

Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?

[tpgp]

Of course, everyone can immediately tell what skype does.

Seriously, is anyone else getting a little sick of the plethora of "me too" comments about the appropriateness of a software product's name on slashdot?

Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?

[briqui]

No skype isn't immediatelyobvious - and perhaps on that basis skype was a poor choice of name.

But in addition to this there is one other major difference - the advertising budget.

Skype has thrown a huge amount of money and resources into turning itself into a 'name' brand and as such it makes sense that they should go with something original and snappy.

Unless we want to put together a community project to fund an advert in New York Times for every open source project it probably makes more sense to pick obvious names.

Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?

[pomo monster]

Jesus Christ. The eye stumbles on the acronym soup in the very first line of that description. Nobody's going to notice the phrase "audio and video calls," buried as it is among four references in only three fucking sentences to "SIP and H.323." Try this instead:

Ekiga: Bring your friends and colleagues onto your desktop with Ekiga's standards-compliant videoconferencing and audio calls. Supports all modern VoIP features of SIP and H.323.

There you go. Direct, clear, helpful. Maybe even stuff the last sentence with all the other technical descriptions in the fine print. What's not to like?

Name Change

[Slack3r78]

Since I have the karma to burn:

GnomeMeeting to Ekiga is quite probably the single worst name change I've ever seen in a piece of software, commercial or free aside. They went from a name that clearly communicated the software's purpose to something cryptic that isn't even easily pronounceable. (Yes, I am aware of the new name's origin, that doesn't make it any less terrible a name for a software project).

So the new name fails on pretty much every front. It fails to communicate the purpose of the program. It fails to be something the average person will actually remember. It fails to be something that's not going to scare off a neophyte. As a program that's bandied about for inclusion in Gnome proper, this pretty significant IMO.

Re:Name Change

[caseih]

Skype anyone?

Re:ANYTHING has to be better...

[Aspirator]

At least with a name like Netmeeting I had some idea what
the software did.

Now with names like Ekiga in my menus I won't have a clue.

Re:ANYTHING has to be better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now with names like Ekiga in my menus I won't have a clue.

Yeah, it's like calling a spreadsheet "Excel". How will anyone know what it does with a name like that. Or calling a retailer "Amazon". In the business world you'd be dead in the water if you used names like that.