[Openframeworkwg] Googleable names

[Paul Grun]

Look, the objective here started out as a way to increase our visibility on Google.

My personal opinion is much different than Doug's in a number of respects.  I do not think that anything we do should be tied to the underlying interconnect e.g. RDMA.  I do think that the major thrust of what we are doing is creating a framework that supports a set of composable APIs that provide applications with access to a set of I/O services.

To me, the focus is still, and should remain, on the framework part of it because that is the unique thing we're doing.  To be specific, the key insight, at least as I see it, is that there is no single API to rule them all, but rather a set of composable APIs and that requires a framework to make it work.  That's what makes the work we are doing unique.

As far as "fabrics" go, the name of our parent organization, for better or for worse, is the OpenFabrics Alliance.  I don't see us changing that.  Nor do I read that as implying that we (the OFA) are defining the fabrics themselves; that has never been the charter of the OFA.

Our current name is OpenFramework Working Group.  Someone pointed out that that does not google well.  But there is a fine line to be walked here - let's not give ourselves a name that is so obscure that nobody knows how to google for us at all.  A completely unique name is of no use at all if no one searches for it.

So I suggest we stick pretty close to home and go with OFA Framework Working Group - OFWG.

Any objections?
-Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Ledford [mailto:dledford at redhat.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2014 9:17 AM
To: Paul Grun; Jeff Squyres (jsquyres); Open Frameworks Working Group
Subject: Re: [Openframeworkwg] Googleable names

On 1/28/2014 7:20 PM, Paul Grun wrote:
> Just to limit the range of options a tiny bit, I would like to urge us to choose a name that allows us to retain the existing acronym - OFWG.  (Note that an acronym often doesn't map exactly word-for-word with its antecedent).

Just my $.02, but "ick" to all suggestions so far.  I have a pet peeve with labels that don't really belong with what they label, and that's how I feel about what's been suggested so far.  In addition, I would strongly urge us to choose a label that is accurate and portrays our intent over sticking to any previous acronym just for the sake of preserving an acronym that may not have ever been a good acronym for us in the first place.

I would argue that we are not actually working on fabrics at the moment.
 The InfiniBand fabric is already well defined and this group has no intention of changing that (that I've seen so far).  The iWARP protocol is also well defined with no intention of changing it.  The RoCE protocol is somewhat less well defined, but still no intention of changing it.  The US NIC protocol is proprietary and not subject to this body's manipulations.  All in all, I see nothing in what we are doing here that speaks the word "fabrics" to me in the sense that the word is usually used to talk about the physical networking layer.

I have, however, seen over and over again that this is all about an application programming interface intended to work on multiple fabrics.

As such, I would suggest that a much more accurate label for this group would be the OpenFabrics Alliance Fabric Agnostic RDMA Application Programming Interface Working Group, which can be shortened down multiple ways:

{OpenFabrics Alliance,OFA,OF} {Fabric Agnostic RDMA,FA-RDMA,faRDMA,FAR} API WG

I could also see replacing "Fabric Agnostic" with "General" or "Generic", so make the appropriate substitutions above and see if that terms seems better to you.

Now, to the point of Googleability.  If I understand what people are talking about here, the purpose of checking this is to make sure that if we were to adopt this name, then we would not be competing with other search hits on Google so that this project would be prominently displayed in the search results.  My searches show that this acronym would be almost entirely uncontended.  The only other contention is if you do just "FAR API", then you hit on another FAR API, but if your term has OpenFabrics or RDMA instead of just FAR, then current search results already point overwhelmingly to the OpenFabrics web site, so we already own this term, and making it into a working group would simply strengthen those web search results.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openframeworkwg-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org 
> [mailto:openframeworkwg-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of 
> Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
> Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 11:10 AM
> To: Open Frameworks Working Group
> Subject: [Openframeworkwg] Googleable names
> 
> Two suggestions off the top of my head:
> 
> 1. OpenFabricFrameworks (OFF)
> 2. FabricFrameworks (FF)
> 
> Both could be amusingly abbreviated 0xFF.  Both also appear to be googleable: for #1, lots of OpenFabrics stuff comes up.  For #2, nothing exact comes up.
> 
> Anyone got any other name suggestions?
>