Comment by bob1029
4 hours ago
I would have stood my ground on the first name longer. Make these legal teams do some actual work to prove they are serious. Wait until you have no other option. A polite request is just that. You can happily ignore these.
The 2nd name change is just inexcusable. It's hard to take a project seriously when a random asshole on Twitter can provoke a name change like this. Leads me to believe that identity is more important than purpose.
The first name and the second name were both terrible. Yes, the creator could have held firm on "clawd" and forced Anthropic to go through all the legal hoops but to what end? A trademark exists to protect from confusion and "clawd" is about as confusing as possible, as if confusing by design. Imagine telling someone about a great new AI project called "clawd" and trying to explain that it's not the Claude they are familiar with and the word is made up and it is spelled "claw-d".
OpenClaw is a better name by far, Anthropic did the creator a huge favor by forcing him to abandon "clawd".
Interesting, I dont read claude the same way as clawd, but I'm based in Spain so I tend to read it as French or Spanish. I tend to read it as `claud-e` with an emphasis on the e at the end. I would read clawd as `claw-d` with a emphasis in the D, but yes i guess American English would pronounce them the same way.
Edit: Just realized i have been reading and calling it after Jean-Claude Van Damme all this time. Happy friday!
As the article says, it’s a 2 month old weekend project. It’s doing a lot better than my two month old weekend projects.
While weekend project may be correct, I think it gives a slightly wrong impression of where this came from. Peter Steinberger is the creator who created and sold PSPDFKit, so he never has to work again. I'm listening to a podcast he was on right now and he talks about staying up all night working on projects just because he's hooked. According to him made 6,600 commits in January alone. I get the impression that he puts more time into his weekend project than most of us put into our jobs.
That's not to diminish anything he's done because frankly, it's really fucking impressive, but I think weekend project gives the impression of like 5 hours a week and I don't think that's accurate for this project.
Number of commits doesn't mean much.
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I draw the opposite conclusion. Willingness to change the name leads me to conclude purpose is more important than identity.
Now if it changes _again_ that's a different story. If it changes Too Much, it becomes a distraction
Isnt this name change because the previous one was hard to say, as per the blog post? Isnt that a case of focusing more on identity than purpose?
More that moltbot is ugly and was chosen in a bit of a panic after Anthropic complained. No one liked it, including the people who chose it.
It wasn't just one random asshole, tons of people were saying that "Moltbot" is a terrible name. (I agree, although I didn't tweet at him about it.)
OpenClaw is a million times better.
Just curious, is there something specific about Moltbot that makes it a terrible name? Like any connotations or associations or something? Non-native speaker here, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with it that would warrant the hate it's gotten. (But I agree that OpenClaw _sounds_ better)
No connotations or associations that I can think of it. It just sounds weird and is kinda hard to pronounce - doesn't roll off the tongue easily.
It's not the worst thing ever, it's just not a very aesthetically pleasing combination of sounds.
Which random asshole? Haven't heard about it.
I’m guessing they mean this, linked from the post: https://xcancel.com/NetworkChuck/status/2016254397496414317