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<p>Dear midPoint community,</p>
<p>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.<span id="more-7536"></span></p>
<p>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 <a href="https://evolveum.com/ten-years-of-midpoint/">midPoint
project was born</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <code>.com</code>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>(Reposted from <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://evolveum.com/where-did-evolveum-come-from/">Evolveum
blog</a>) </p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com</pre>
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