[hobbit] Hobbit renaming status ?

[Henrik Stoerner]

In <BAY138-DS135DABA00DDBE77CA0F0E9F740 at phx.gbl> "T.J. Yang" <tj_yang at hotmail.com> writes:

>Can't wait until decision made by Henrik. I am betting the new name will 
>be hobbitmon. Thus I am using hobbitmon in my current development work.
>but would it be HobbitMon or hobbitmon ?

Don't bet on it.

I've been going over the various suggestions this past week, and I've
setup a few loose criteria for judging the names. In no particular
order:

*) No references to Tolkien characters. Although I might be able to
   get away with "hobbitmon" or Gandalfr (thanks, Anna - didn't know 
   those names came from the Edda), I do not want to push my luck
   any further.
*) Likewise, no names that might infringe on existing characters from
   movies, books etc. 
*) Nothing that is trademark'ed.
*) The name should be somewhat meaningful. Not necessarily obvious,
   but enough that it is understandable. Also, somewhat "business-
   like". (Sorry Vernon - I enjoyed Your ventures into Mesopotamian
   astronomy and egyptology, since those are also hobby-interests
   of mine, but very few would know who "Horus" is, or what was
   the role of Aldebaran).
*) The name should be short. Preferably two or three syllables, and
   fit into the space currently on the webpages where it says "Hobbit"
   now. This is because the name is frequently used in speech; I often
   have people at work asking me "what's on Hobbit right now?" if they
   need to know what issues there are currently. It just wouldn't feel
   right if that was "what's on smart-and-open-systems-monitor right
   now" ...
*) .com, .net and .org should preferably be available.

Of the suggestions I've seen on the list, there are only a few that fit
these criteria: savemon, hobmon, Tibboh (not obvious, but I like it), 
OpenGuardian.

Of those, OpenGuardian is my current favourite - enough so that I've
registered the openguardian.com and openguardian.eu domains. It does
have something against it, though: OpenGuardian is a component of a
product called "HostGuardian", which is described on hostguardian.com:

    "HostGuardian offers a complete set of monitoring tools that 
     verify not only a machine on the internet is responding, 
     but that it is delivering the correct content, replying to 
     processes, and connected without latency or packet loss."

This is similar enough to what Hobbit does that using the name for
Hobbit could be a problem. It isn't trademarked, according to the USPTO 
trademark website, but there's a potential for conflict.


I have two other names that I've come up with. The first is "G-Lance"
meaning "viGiLance", "monitoring at a G-Lance", and the 'G' could also
mean GNU, GPL, Gratis etc. g-lance.com is registered to someone doing
graphics free-lance work, but I've grabbed .net, .org and .eu.

I won't tell you the second one yet. The domain is currently registered
by someone else, but appears to be completely inactive. It expires on 
Friday (Aug. 15th), and if it becomes available I'll take it.


So stay tuned ...


Regards,
Henrik