[midPoint] Blog: Why Is MidPoint Called “MidPoint”?

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

There are some questions asked by midPoint community, questions that go 
back to the early days of the project. MidPoint is ten years old, 
therefore this is appropriate time to have a look back. So, why is 
midPoint called “midPoint”?

It was early spring 2011. We were starting a new project. We knew what 
we wanted to do, we even had a bunch of code, but we did not have a 
name. It is known fact that naming things is incredibly hard. What name 
would you choose for new open source identity management system? We 
wanted something that would be quite short, as we didn’t want to write 
down long name over and over again. We wanted something that would 
describe the character or nature of the project. At the time there was a 
trend to name open source projects like OpenTLA or FreeFoo. That was not 
what we wanted. We were looking for a good, simple name.

We were thinking: what makes our project unique? Obviously, the code was 
open source. Yet, it was 2010s already, open source was everywhere. Is 
there anything else that sets us apart? At that time, identity 
management field was dominated by commercial software. The existing IDM 
platforms were usually bloated and complex things, riding high on 
marketing buzz, awkwardly integrated into technology “suites”. It took 
more than a week to install them, it took months or even years to make 
them work. On the other hand, our new project could be simply 
downloaded, deployed into a web container and it worked. How have we 
achieved this? What have we done differently than big corporations?

Our team was just a bunch of engineers back then. No marketing, no 
sales, just engineering, seasoned with a dash of management. Perhaps 
that was the key. Engineers are developing software for other engineers 
to use. That was something we could understand. That was a concept we 
could use, even with our amateur-level marketing skills. We though about 
good engineering practices, about the times when things were done 
properly, built to last. What were the things that could represent that? 
Drawing board, blueprint, pencil, ruler, square, compass … which led us 
to geometry. Maybe geometric terms would make a good project name? What 
about “Triangle”, “Cube”, “Rhombo-Hexagonal Dodecahedron” – no, 
definitely not that one! And then, there it was: “midpoint”. That was a 
perfect fit. Good, simple name. Perfectly appropriate for an identity 
management system, which sits in the middle, in the centre of 
everything. We have fashioned it with capital P as “midPoint”, to add 
some extra flair. And we were done. We have got a name for our project!

The “proper engineering” theme stuck. We have used it when we set up new 
company: Evolveum. The enginnering theme inspired our original logo. We 
tried to use the theme also on our first web page, which was not a huge 
success. But that is another story, for another blog post.

(Reposted from Evolveum blog 
<https://evolveum.com/why-is-midpoint-called-midpoint/>)

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com

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