[midPoint] Blog: Where Did “Evolveum” Come From?

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

Naming things is hard. It is even harder to find good name for a 
company, especially if a company is built to last. Such as Evolveum. So, 
how did our company got its name? This is a story of the name, going 
back a decade, to early 2011.

Ten years ago, we were in a situation when we had to make several 
decisions. There were technology decisions. We had a bunch of code that 
needed almost complete re-structuring around a new skeleton. We did 
that, and in fact it was quite easy. We published the code and midPoint 
project was born <https://evolveum.com/ten-years-of-midpoint/>. However, 
there were organizational and business decisions to make. It is not 
enough to publish the code. The code has to be maintained and developed. 
That needs skills and time, provided by people that need to pay their 
bills. We had to secure funding for our brand new project. That was 
difficult part of the problem.

We were (and still are) based in Slovakia. Slovakia was not the nicest 
place for open source projects in 2011. The pain of 2008 crisis was 
still there, the money was tight. Even though Slovakia had been part of 
European Union for several years, many things still had a distinct 
post-communist taste. Corruption was everywhere. There was basically 
zero chance for us to get European community funding or any other public 
money without bribery, fraud or unbearable overhead. One thing was quite 
clear: we were on our own. We had to provide the funding ourselves, 
without any help.

We had been entertaining the idea of establishing an open source company 
since early 2011. Many things are needed to establish a company, such as 
money, plans, paperwork and such boring stuff. However, one thing is 
needed even before all of that is settled: a name. Good, solid, elegant 
name. However, when it comes to company names, things get even harder. 
Company name must be quite unique, unique enough for us to be able to 
register a |.com| domain. That was a major obstacle. Whatever name we 
could think of, the corresponding domain was already taken. Of course, 
we could use initial letters of our names to get something like 
“KSRSIF”. That was not a way for us, as that would be quite ugly and 
extremely boring. Or maybe we could make up a nonsense word such as 
“Huxamaxa”. That could work. Yet, we wanted better name, a name that 
would actually mean something. A name that would characterize us.

Then I’ve got an idea. We could automate the search for a name! I sat 
down and wrote a short and very ugly Perl script. The script started 
from a list of words that I though would characterize us. The script 
tried to combine the words, applying prefixes and suffixes, trying 
several mutations of the words, each time checking for domain name 
availability. The result was quite a long list of names, most of which 
ranged from strange to completely ridiculous. However, there were few 
gems hidden in this heap.

I went through the output of the script, selecting reasonable 
candidates. I came across “evolveum” entry. I thought: “Oh, this is 
nice, it sounds like an chemical element of evolution”. Without much 
further thoughts I have placed in on a shortlist, together with a dozen 
of other reasonable names. Then we reviewed the shortlist with fellow 
conspirators. There was no clear consensus at first, but after a couple 
of iterations the name “Evolveum” emerged.

We went on and registered the domains. However, we were still miles away 
from formally establishing a company. We had to think about money, 
business plans, logo, website, business model, partner network and all 
such things – and I still had my doubts whether this can work at all. Of 
course, I was wrong, and the plan worked. But more on that later.

(Reposted from Evolveum blog 
<https://evolveum.com/where-did-evolveum-come-from/>)

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com

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