Comment by ndiddy
6 hours ago
> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.
If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.
And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.
Not necessarily.
The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.
"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.
If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.
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That’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example.
It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.
It seems like it would be simple to just create a fork and archive the old repo. Add a note to the old repo, update a couple of the most important docs and links, and then worry about the rest later. It can be low hanging fruit for new contributors.
Change is painful in general. But it may have a sufficient upside to withstand the pain.
Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.
Yes, I know, but that all just underscores what I said about it being emotional. Logically it's not only Wacom but for any tablet. It would do better with a new name as other competitors would help. But the emotional resistance to changing the name keeps those logical improvements form happening.
Second hardest thing in CS besides cache invalidation and off by one errors....
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True nerds name things properly in the first place. The liberal use of -wacom throughout project names and repositories is a consequence of the Wacom itch being scratched - and then that scratch becoming the base upon which Wacoms' competitors can participate. A true nerd would've skipped including the brand in a directory name, in the first place .. I bet these drivers started off being written by graphics designers, not nerds.
Yet name changes happen easily when legally forced. Wireshark, MariaDB, and LibreOffice.
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just change the name to mocaW
main vs master
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Preach. And it's a disease.
Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
Yep. I was an intern at Disney Feature Animation when GIMP first came out. It was really exciting, an alternative to Photoshop (which used to run on linux!) and our in-house painting tools. I pushed for artists to use it, but was told by management to stop mentioning it as "Disney could never use a tool called GIMP". Also that reaction from several artists (who were already tech-savvy, linux using folks in the exact target audience) so it wasn't just "corporate". TBH I think a lot of programmers do this intentionally to protect themselves from their little project ever becoming too mainstream.
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In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me.
It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
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I'm surprised they didn't just write it out as GNU IMP in the website, documentation, and about boxes. They could just leave the code alone and save themselves the trouble.
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Its most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is ..
Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.
It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.
Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...
I think it makes them own you - a little. You look subsidiary to Wacom.
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Devil's advocate: why should the project have to rename because some companies want them to? That just shifts the window slightly closer to corporate control, something that millions of people worldwide bemoan.
More importantly, why would other companies offer free support for something that will garner free advertising for a competitor?
Nobody except power user tech heads (and apparently, corporations) give two shits about the filenames of the drivers in use
Yes. It feels like the article was leading towards a reason for not doing that, but then suddenly it just ends.
Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.
And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.