The top 10 offenders of opensource projects for bad or offensive naming and branding their software.  Viral? Ignorance? Offensive? Bad? Genius? You decide.

The Top Ten Worst Names

10. Gnome – What does bigfoot have to do with a hobbit like creature?  There is not even an a clippy version of a gnome on the desktop.  Not that I’m a clippy advocate.

9. The Gimp – Derogatory term and it sounds like the software is inept.  A good reason not to use GNU as part of your name. Imp is cooler.

8. GNU/Linux - Having to type GNU in front of Linux is both time consuming and pointless. Which is on par with anything from Mr. Stallman these days.

7. openSuse – um. Is it still a mystery why there are not as many women as men in software development?  Open in front of any one’s name is probably never a good idea.

6. Mono – In Spanish it is a monkey, in English it is a disease.

5. Tomboy – Who is going to go around admitting to using this aloud?

4. Yum – I don’t know which is worse. A food related acronym?  Or that it stands for is yellowdog updater modified.

3. PHP – Recursive acronym? “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”?  Why? Just why?  This is the same  evil as made-up words used by the press like “athleticism”, then having it added to the dictionary. ick.

2.  god – A ruby plugin.  It brings shame that developers fight over software tools and languages like it is politics or religion. Ridiculous, I know. Then someone  just had to bring religion into it?

1. Sperm Reports – I’m thinking someone was either downing pints at a bar, or lost a bet. I really don’t want to even think about other reasons for this name.

Honorable Mentions.

Any web 2.0 project like drupal or joomla. Netoops (.net object oriented portal) or Xoops (extensible object oriented portal).  Scrum & Scum Master. PR nightmare.

Feel free to add more below.