There is only room for 26 software vendors

calendar 2004-09-17 · 2 min read · integration  ·
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Those marketing guys must be rather clueless, lots of software vendors pick a couple of letters and prefix all their software titles with it.

I can only gues this is due to lack of inspiration or to create at least the impression that the software is like a suite of packages which work together (which it does not in most cases) It's not only the professional marketing departments who lack inspiration, Open Source developers, whether professional or not, have a liking for <em>prefabricated</em> names too. Here's the slate what i could come up with without much research, lots of letters left, so i you have some plans grab one, while they are still in stock:

  1. The a is liberally replaced with a @ in both names of classes (eM@il) and names of software packages;
  2. The e seems to have grown into a prefix to be used for a class of software (eMail, eLearning, eCommerce) roughly describing doing the classical thing, but then with the internet (whatever that means in practice);
  3. gnu - Applications which like to identify themselves (i guess) with the FSF or the GNU software set or the GPL (gnuTella,;
  4. g - GNOME stuff;
  5. i - Apple (iTunes, iChat);
  6. k - KDE applications (kNode, kWrite);
  7. moz - Based on mozilla framework (mozBlog, mozEdit) [Note: also the postfix zilla is often used];
  8. x - X windows applications (xChat, xEyes);
  9. xar - Xaraya modules [ hesitated a bit to put this one in ;-) ] And of course there is microsoft which just puts MS in front of everything. I'm sure there are more examples, the above is by head. So, if you want a letter prefix, get one fast; we only have 26 letters.