Mylar is reborn. Long live Mylyn!
, June 11th, 2007We have renamed the Mylar project to Mylyn and are in the process of moving from the Eclipse Technology Project to the Tools Project. As discussed in the Rename FAQ, this change has been deemed necessary and we have decided to do it as quickly as possible in order to ensure that it is completed in time for Europa. Two years ago, we started incubating on Eclipse.org and had our first 0.3 release along with Eclipse 3.1. Both the need for this change and the graduation to Eclipse Tools indicate how quickly the project has moved from incubation technology to a widely adopted tool and framework. Mylar has grown up and outgrown its name.
The new name that I created for the project is Mylyn. In addition to being a simple, unique and only a two-letter difference from the old name, it has a connotation that’s closely related to the ideas behind the technology. I came up with this word when doing my PhD, while I was trying to figure out how to make tools better leverage our memory and engaged in an email exchange with a neuroscientist about the effects of myelin improving recall. Myelin accelerates our thoughts by making neurons dramatically more efficient at conducting electricity. The Mylyn name is a tribute to this substance — on several occasions I have heard users state that our tool increases their efficiency to the point where they are able to code at the speed of thought.
There are numerous constraints and tradeoffs in choosing a name, ranging from trademark issues to uniqueness of search hits. I believe that this name will serve well at identifying the project in the long run while providing the easiest transition from the old name. In addition, we’ll finally stop confusing kids Googling for the Mylar film when doing science fair projects.
Undertaking a refactoring of a project name is a tremendous task. With the help of the Eclipse IDE’s refactoring capabilities and the Eclipse Foundation’s infrastructure savvy, we will make it as easy as possible for both users and integrators to transition to the new software. The rename has already happened in our source code and the web site renames are underway. To be notified of further details please watch the Mylyn page or add yourself as a CC to bug 191406: rename Mylar project to Mylyn.
Software is much easier to refactor then wetware. It will be a collective effort to wean ourselves off the name that for some conjured images of birthday balloons and plastic film glasses and onto the one that evokes electrical impulses shooting around in your brain at tremendous speed.
Mylar is reborn. Long-live Mylyn!
June 11th, 2007 at 11:33 am
My new favourite project name. Now if I can just convince someone to create a MyGayowski project.
June 13th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Mylyn indeed accelerates my thoughts
Those Patent/Trademark issues sometimes quite annoying. But Mylar->Mylyn seems like a small step with the additional benefit of being pretty unique… Uniqueness is quite important in this world. eclipse, europa, jazz are very ambiguous.
Michael
P.S.: another new word for my spelling checker(s): Mylyn
June 14th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Michael: That’s very good to hear. Yes, trademark issues are considerably less fun to deal with than the technical issues! So it took me a while to get to the point that you’re at. But now that we are nearly done with the rename I couldn’t agree more about the benefits that uniqueness will bring in the long run. Having a 5 letter name that is memorable, meaningful, sounds good, and that we have both the trandemark and .com and .org domain names for is going to be very valuable and make the project very easy to find and identify.
Lynn: you could also consider GayowskiLar.
June 19th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Interesting. Well, I pointed out the fact of the Branded product’s existence in my German Myl(ar)yn article late last year.
Also that the company developed those foils around the time Nuclear Tests started to become widely used, and that it’s most likely, Mylar(R) has not only been used to watch the Sun since then…;-)
Preventing bogus threats like SCO similar more recent acts of highwaymanship, like Microsoft’s claims against the Open Source community, I fully understand this move and agree it’s better now than later.
Also Mylyn is adopted by companies which are also known for changing their brands and names a lot, such as Borland/Inprise/CodeGear
Compared to their product policy, I think this change is quite a smooth and easy one.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:33 am
Congratulations man! That is very good name and I can see deep insight in choosing it
Hope you keep the good job under new name.
–long live Mylyn!
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:50 am
Thanks for the support Werner and Ashkan. The transition has been a lot of work for us but has gone smoothly considering the extent of the changes that we had to make. The best part is that we will not be requireing people to uninstall the old plug-ins, instead they will disable themselves when you first install Mylyn.
A very good thing that’s come out of this is that we used the change of the plug-in namespace to restructure all of our plug-ins and features to be more modular and more configurable. This means that you can now do things like install Mylyn into Eclipse configuration that do not include the JDT or PDE. This happened just in time, since the EPP project is including Mylyn in 3 out of 4 of the default downloads!
June 28th, 2007 at 3:36 am
Mik, I am closely watching Eclipse Mylar website and releases. It’s a great work by you and your team. The features are quite promising.