Jesse Silver
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Posted: September 18, 2008 19:53 by Jesse Silver
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An interesting question arose this week: Should the site allow open source project names to be similar or identical to the names of major or even minor projects hosted on other sites (Google Code, Source Forge, etc..)? The relevant example, in this case, is "GNU". We are hosting a project that will port GNU tools to Solaris, but there is clearly already a major open source project called "GNU". Its goals are obviously different, but the name is not. We have checked other forges' approaches: Google actually cross references new project names against projects hosted on other sites and prevents replication. Other forges do not perform this check. Should we? |
Community Input on Project Names
4 posts
Replies: 3 - Last Post: May 10, 2011 03:27
by: dengdai
by: dengdai
showing 1 - 4 of 4
wayne meissner
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Posted: September 19, 2008 17:38 by wayne meissner
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I would say yes - it should check against other forges for same named projects. As long as you provide some way for the owners of the project on the other forge to register the same name here if they are moving it. Its probably not big deal though, since everyone but google seems to get along fine without it. The check might add a "legitimizing" factor to kenai though - to show that its not the big, evil, is a good OSS team player, etc. |
kkrugler
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Posted: September 20, 2008 03:53 by kkrugler
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Well, from the perspective of our open source code/project search engine (http://www.krugle.org), it would be great if names were unique. At one point during an OSDL session a few years back there was a proposal to create a Galactic Project Registry to help avoid the problems caused by duplicate names. That wound up being a non-starter, but even if it did exist, there's still the issue of a vapor trails when a project moves between hosters - for example, from sourceforge.net to java.net to apache.org. So we currently disambiguate based on repository/name, which means it isn't much of an issue for us if you have duplicate names. But we're moving to an architecture where the project key (the short name we use in URIs) has to be unique, and then it does start to hurt if you create a duplicate name. We could probably provide a simple ping service that you could call with a project key or name, and get back 200 or 403 depending on whether it already exists. -- Ken |
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Jesse Silver
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Posted: September 23, 2008 09:12 by Jesse Silver
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Thanks Ken. We're going to discuss this and get back to you. By the way, Krugle.org is a great find. Thanks for the tip. |
Replies: 3 - Last Post: May 10, 2011 03:27
by: dengdai
by: dengdai
