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A few thoughts and comments on naming conventions.
To help guide the name of this effort I think it would be helpful to establish what exactly the names OpenGuage and MPGuino apply to and perhaps who they belong to.
I haven't read enough of the early project posts to know if OpenGauge was originally envisioned to be the name of one instrument or possibly a family of instruments.
It seems clear MPGuino was meant to be the name for an Arduino based MPG instrument.
I understand dcb's concern about name confusion and if other initiatives use MPGuino in the name it will lead to headaches for him as others expect him to resolve technical problems he had nothing to do with. But does any contributor to an open source project really have claim to the name or any design details? Is there a GPL referenced for the opengauge project that says anything on the subject? As a courtesy to someone who has made a major contribution to the project it would be good to respect dcb's wishes on the use of the MPGuino name.
From the standpoint of branding and naming conventions this is what makes sense to me. Use OpenGauge as the brand name for a grass roots effort to develop open source instrument designs for the masses. Use MPGuino as the name for the Auduino family of MPG instruments developed by this group.
What doesn't make sense to me is restricting the use of the name MPGuino to a version of software that no longer supports the Arduino platform for which it was named. Shouldn't that now be called MPG.ccp?
In the end I think the best thing that could happen would be if the rewrite proves to be stable and easier to use, eventually winning dcb's approval to call it "MPGuino 2.0".
There was a kit for another version of MPGuion hardware. There is a wiki that has directions for assembling an MPGuino from an Arduino board. And of course there is the current assembled version of the MPGuino. If there is an obvious name for a software update that will run on these devices it's going to include MPGuino.
If the obvious name can't be used I toss out the following ideas: MPGspork, OpenGauge Code 2, or Arduino Gauge.
I'll watch from the sidelines and leave the political debate to those who care. I would suggest a separate thread to discuss naming conventions so that this thread can focus on technical details of improving the instrument.
Mike
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