OSS Name Collisions

Comments focus on open source projects with names conflicting with existing tools, languages, or other projects, urging developers to choose unique names to avoid confusion and improve discoverability.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Open Source
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#977
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Keywords

GVM DEVELOPMENT TL STABLE CLI OSS GIMPS youtube.js castleproject.org GH project projects open source renaming names rename open source projects golang source projects source

Sample Comments

greenchair Jul 5, 2024 View on HN

I'm curious about how the project name was chosen considering there are existing tools with the same name.

JimDabell Dec 1, 2019 View on HN

Picking a project name that doesn't clash with something that already exists.

mwj Sep 20, 2018 View on HN

Did you Google the name first? This already conflicts with about 4 different open source projects, a container engine and a programming language

fortawesome Apr 10, 2015 View on HN

You might want to consider changing the name. It's not great practice to use the name of someone else's open source thing to name yours. It's fine in the tagline.

tapia Apr 14, 2014 View on HN

Maybe the person who published this link just wanted to remember/show, that the name was already taken by another project (the name is almost the same) and that the programmers should consider changing it.

malkia Sep 14, 2010 View on HN

It looks like there few other projects with the same name.

karolist Mar 20, 2024 View on HN

The name collisions for opensource projects stopped mattering a long time ago

personjerry Mar 13, 2023 View on HN

Is the naming getting out of hand for these projects?

realitysballs Apr 18, 2023 View on HN

Intentions are good here , but the name is highly similar and so if you want to promote the project it seems fitting to rename for the sake of gaining more trust from new users. It is annoying though that the open-source well-intentioned project has to make the change tho.

Tmpod Aug 18, 2025 View on HN

Was thinking the same. Might be worth looking into renaming the project, to prevent situations like that for both maintainers and users.