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<p>Dear midPoint community,</p>
<p> 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”?<span id="more-7534"></span></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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?</p>
<p> 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!</p>
<p> 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.</p>
(Reposted from <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://evolveum.com/why-is-midpoint-called-midpoint/">Evolveum
blog</a>)
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com</pre>
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