For some reason, now I don't have academic deadlines looming over me, I am getting back into arsing around with Linux. Because my desktop machine sucks too much to run GNOME (and GNOME sucks too much to run on my machine), I looked at various tiling window managers. They are nice, but the learning curve is pretty damn steep - and I say that as someone who codes in a fair few programming languages, knows Vim inside out and all that jazz. 
However cool Xmonad is, I'm not learning Haskell so I can manipulate windows on my desktop. Same for awesome and Lua. (Hint: if you want to create a configuration language, Ruby does that kind of thing particularly well.)
I wanted something a little bit more sane and user-friendly - I just want to cut the bloat out of my X Windows experience and not have to use the mouse much: I have no desire to learn something too crazy and new. So I googled something like 'tiling window managers for sane people'.
And I found Scrotwm. It's written in C, aims to be small, compact and fast
, sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. Perfect.
Then I saw this post criticising the name: A perfect example of the naive "If we build it they will come" mentality of some FOSS projects which think they can ignore marketing matters completely, without consequences.
Cry me a fucking river. Some hackers created a tiling window manager that is, by their own admission, by hackers for hackers
, and it's the marketing crime of the century because they used a name that's pronounced in the same way as scrotum.
Look, if you are smart enough to be considering using anything other than the GNOME/KDE default, you are smart enough not to be offended by naming a window manager after a scrotum. And, well, it tries to stay out of the way
is mildly amusing as a strapline.
I just do not understand people who decide what software to use based on the title. But also who decided all of a sudden that it should be a primary goal of the free software movement to produce software with inoffensive names. Is it to ensure that kids aren't offended by opening up a terminal window in scrotwm to install authgasm.
No, no, no. It's about advocacy. And it's about The Boss. The Boss will say "Can you believe it? These Linux doofuses called a product 'scrotum'. They must be some kind of evil communist bastards. Let's buy Vista instead."
But it's not the job of the open source community as a whole to convince your goofy boss to use open source software because he is too much of a dumbass to figure out that whether or not a piece of software is pronounced 'scrotum' or not is not an issue. Whether the software is reliable, well-designed, well-tested, supported and helps you meet the business objectives better or cheaper is the issue. Even if it is called scrotum.
A bunch of people have built software that they give away for free to anybody and you are whining that the name is a little bit too risque for blue-chip corporations? Fuck that shit and be sure to cut the brakes on the car of whatever stupid fucker dragged that idiocy into town.
It's not up to individual hackers to make sure they are corporate-friendly or "brand-safe". If you don't like the name 'Scrotwm', find yourself a spike and impale yourself on it. There are companies which abstract away Linux's hackerish rough edges - Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Cygnus, Sun etc. If it's such a big concern, they won't include Scrotwm or other naughtily-named packages on their servers, or they'll change the package name slightly to make it safe for the prudish (just stick a hyphen in the middle to get scrot-wm). Of course, I had no trouble installing scrotwm from the Ubuntu sources.
But what is the underlying issue here? The idea that a package name is going to affect your boss. I can't imagine any scenario when someone is going to say "Hey, boss, we are thinking about using this Linux thing here." and then go on to say "Well, we are planning to use XFree with scrotwm." There's no reason your boss should care at all which window manager you are using on the machine. I don't tell my professors or my clients or whoever which OS I'm running. They can tell when I turn up with a Mac running OS X. But they don't know that at home I'm running a mixture of Windows XP, OS X and Linux. It's none of their business, just as it's none of my business whether the car mechanic listens to rock or jazz.
Does this mean you should not care at all about corporate adoption? No, of course not. When I heard that BBC folks were using Reddy internally, I was pleased. If it had been called 'Redballs' and they had insisted that the name be changed before they'd adopt it, I'd tell them to get stuffed.
If you are a hacker and you want to name your project something dirty or saucy, go right ahead. Offend The Boss - he's purely a figure of the imagination of prudes. If you want to be completely safe, you should probably consider some other path in life than writing open source software. Keep the geek and open source community interesting: don't bow down to bullshit marketing pressure. The flipside to this is don't just become OpenWindows. OpenOffice is the most pointless thing I have ever seen - I can't imagine myself ever using it. That's because non-open Office is a crap piece of software. Turds don't start tasting any better if they've come out of an open source process rather than a closed one. Linux isn't just Windows or Mac without the evil corporate overlord. Linux is good because it's governed by hacker-friendly community processes, and produces software that meets our needs, not the needs of Hypothetical Boss or Hypothetical Mum or whatever. If other people can coax that into being useful for non-hackers, great - I have no objections to that. But it's our home first and foremost.
