The Birth of a FOSS Application

Joe Barr writes "Brice Burges explains why and how he created a new free software application, as well as what he learned from the birthing process, in a story on Linux.com. The story provides first-hand insights into the frustrations and satisfactions of developers working on free/open source projects. From the article: 'I'm always disappointed to hear open source project members say that they had "their developer" modify an aspect of the program without ever hearing from that developer or seeing any of the code. This is not progressive.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

Cease and desist letter because of name

[bhaak1]

I find it surprising that he was very thoughtful about starting a software project - there are a lot of abandonden projects out there that don't work good enough and wouldn't exists if the programmer just had looked around if its really needed.

But with naming his project he just used his initial and "mail". A simple google search would have shown him that this is no good name.

When releasing something to the public I try at least to find a name that doesn't collide with existing projects (and certainly not collides with names of projects that are similar in *function*) and if possible are google unique. Helps track the distribution quite a bit.