> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.
If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.
And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.
The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.
"It's hard!" So?
"It's complicated" So?
"Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.
If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.
>> The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
> I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.
Ignoring for a moment the annoying software engineer tropes of "emotional=bad, logical=good" labeling and its unawareness of the fact that logic and emotions are hopelessly enmeshed; deciding what work to prioritize how you spend your limited time does not seem particularly "emotional."
So there's no point in wasting time on this, if perceived problems are low or nonexistent. Current maintainers probably look at it from a technical pov "it's just a name, who cares"
I think it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. The maintainers sound like they're only considering the technical cost (and judging it not worth it) instead of factoring in the political consequences of keeping the same naming. I actually really respect those who value the technical over the political, but in a large-scale, public-facing project, some politics must be played.
It seems to me like you're viewing the playing of politics as a no-brainer, which is a very different mindset from a Linux contributor. I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.
The ones playing political games dressing them up as technical ones are the worst:
“My approach is technically correct and I won’t change it even though it causes issues down the line”. I’ve seen this a lot in the Gnome/Wayland world.
> I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.
I’m not a kernel developer and the projects I’ve worked on haven’t even been that big, but even there it was necessary to cater to multiple stakeholders and consider multiple viewpoints. I’d go as far as saying that software development in general gets pretty political pretty quickly, as soon as you depend on somebody else’s work or somebody else depends on yours. Every decision will impact somebody and different options will do so differently - these are political considerations.
I can’t imagine this being less of an issue in the kernel.
No, I'm not saying the politics is a no brainer. I'm saying there is a logical barrier to the project succeeding, and it is the name. Other people refuse to work with it using the current name, people who would make it a much more useful product. Deciding it's not a TECHNICAL problem is an emotional decision, because you're not reframing it from what it is, a barrier to success, to something it's not, a non-issue. They're deciding not to engage with the hard problem.
So it will take valuable developer time that might be better utilized to work on something else. And even if they do rename it, there isn't any guarantee that the other vendors would then agree to collaborate.
My point is that from a developers PoV, renaming is not an evident net-gain at all-- might be seen as pointless branding busywork that leeches ressources from "actual" problems.
That is not "being emotional", it's just different priorities.
That’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example.
It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.
It seems like it would be simple to just create a fork and archive the old repo. Add a note to the old repo, update a couple of the most important docs and links, and then worry about the rest later. It can be low hanging fruit for new contributors.
Yes, I know, but that all just underscores what I said about it being emotional. Logically it's not only Wacom but for any tablet. It would do better with a new name as other competitors would help. But the emotional resistance to changing the name keeps those logical improvements form happening.
True nerds name things properly in the first place. The liberal use of -wacom throughout project names and repositories is a consequence of the Wacom itch being scratched - and then that scratch becoming the base upon which Wacoms' competitors can participate. A true nerd would've skipped including the brand in a directory name, in the first place .. I bet these drivers started off being written by graphics designers, not nerds.
You didn't hear the foaming at the mouth shouting to rename master recordings, master documents, or dub over The Master from Dr. Who.
Considering how much effort we had to out into fixing pipelines because of hardcoded scripts, and the lack of good reason to do it its no surprise that it was scoffed at. White keyboard warriors needed to make a change, but couldn't do anything meaningful as it would require actually doing something.
Yep. I was an intern at Disney Feature Animation when GIMP first came out. It was really exciting, an alternative to Photoshop (which used to run on linux!) and our in-house painting tools. I pushed for artists to use it, but was told by management to stop mentioning it as "Disney could never use a tool called GIMP". Also that reaction from several artists (who were already tech-savvy, linux using folks in the exact target audience) so it wasn't just "corporate". TBH I think a lot of programmers do this intentionally to protect themselves from their little project ever becoming too mainstream.
In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me.
It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
The unfortunate truth is that the English speaking market matters for that kind of product and that name is a barrier. It just doesn’t matter that your day to day language or life doesn’t encounter it.
It did stop it from being used in a multiple markets though. Fine is some places, not in others is not good branding, especially when one of the places its not fine in is the biggest and most influential market.
Nobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects).
It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.
I've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point.
To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?"
An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."
Its most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is ..
Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.
It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.
Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...
Devil's advocate: why should the project have to rename because some companies want them to? That just shifts the window slightly closer to corporate control, something that millions of people worldwide bemoan.
Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.
And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.
> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.
Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpose?
The difference I think is that it is reasonable for a company to not want to bother working in a project named after their competitor, when "master" has always had multiple meanings from "formal title for a young boy" to "really experienced tradesperson" to "authoritative record" and it is somewhat unreasonable to associate "authoritative record" with "slave master", especially since git branches were rarely named "slave". Wacom is a brand that hasn't been Xerox'ed or Kleenex'd or Band-aided. I don't call every drawing tablet a Wacom.
When I started using a graphics tablet, long ago, I was confused about why all this stuff was labelled Wacom, and whether it was applicable to me or not, when using a device of another brand. Some parts of it seemed to be, and other parts didn’t? It was very confusing, and a genuine confusion that made me uncertain even in purchasing. (It would be less confusing now because user-facing parts don’t touch the “Wacom” name as much any more.)
Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.
We had to refactor all our internal and external documentation from Master -> leader and slave -> subordinate. So you get things like “… in subordinate mode”.
Thankfully the actual code remained the same (because only engineers look at it).
I've seen "slave nodes" renamed to "children nodes". Because a node that exists solely to support another, more important node, has to carry out the orders it receives from that node, must not do anything on its own, and will be terminated and wiped if it diverges from the vision the main node has — yes, it's a child node alright. You see, that's how children are generally treated in our enlightened society, so the new name is now properly evocative, and has no unfortunate implications.
> Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.
Indeed, neither has any technical reason.
I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.
** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.
I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians would have picked master instead of main despite the British colonial period, this would be a non-issue: the USA could use a different convention (like for units of measurement) and the rest of the world wouldn't notice.
BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.
The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.
It seems most likely to me that this particular sensitivity to any sort of social controversy and the status of the US as the sort of… de-facto default place of doing international business for a long time, are probably linked. The US corporate culture’s default stance is probably a learned reflex. Better to look a little over-sensitive, than to scuttle a deal by blundering into somebody’s cultural trigger.
It seems to be very popular in the US to take offence on behalf of others. For example: one hears of US people getting upset about “cultural appropriation” on behalf of others, when said others are actually actively happy about their culture being shown and appreciated. You can definitely take things too far in either direction.
There's a concept called "allyship", part of which means listening to marginalized people expressing negative reactions to certain popular demeaning acts and acting on their behalf to stop those acts.
In recent memory, you see this in response to last decade's trend of white people wearing Native American headdresses (particular to certain remaining groups of indigenous people in North America) at fashion shows and public events. This was practically the definition of cultural appropriation; in the cultures which display headdresses, one must earn the right to do so, and here you had the descendants of those who committed actual genocide wearing these symbols without even an attempt to understand their significance.
This is in a country that not only practiced genocide, it stole the children of native peoples, ostensibly to educate them to European norms, to cut them off from their hereditary culture; including their language and clothing. It's also a country that continues to ignore its own treaties with indigenous nations and erase their history through "termination" (the policy of un-recognizing individual tribes to eliminate their status).
So maybe it's popular here because this country is particularly terrible at appropriating culture. There's a ton of nuance you might miss if you don't live here and talk to people.
Feel free to reply to that email and let them know that your readers just discovered that instead of considering Wacom alternatives, they now believe that Wacom is the only brand they can use on Linux. It seems like the only valid response to that is to give money to the people who make their hardware usable on my software.
It’s not like they collaborate on closed-source drivers either. If you have two different brands of tablets in your life then you get to deal with weird bugs from their drivers fighting. And if you’re on Windows they may fight with MS’ attempt at default drivers, too.
Good point. You don't even need to rename the upstream project. Just create a new project, and get the code there. Since it's open source, it will eventually make its way into the upstream libwacom as well.
All they have to do is publish a technical PDF with descriptors and stuff. That's it. Why not ask for that? They should see the benefit of their product "just working" with FOSS systems.
Maybe people don't realize that this is very much within the capabilities of modern AI nowadays?
At $dayjob we have encountered people reverse engineering our driver with Claude and creating GitHub repos with pretty useful vibecoded tools and documentation.
Yes, the raw binaries of the driver. Not leaked source code or anything like that.
One thing I miss from Windows is the tablet driver GUI. "cinnamon-settings wacom" doesn't let me map buttons to keys (important for software like FireAlpaca, which pans with the space key instead of supporting the middle mouse button like everybody else in the planet), and it also doesn't let me remap the tablet area to arbitrary screen coordinates. These are things I could do on Windows that I can't do through the GUI.
I wrote a Python script to do it using xsetwacom, but I don't know if it would work for anybody else. I don't know if xsetwacom is only for wacom tablets, or if xsetwacom is only for X11 (I'm not on Wayland yet).
For my part, I've been using Wacom tablets and styluses and digitizers since placing a same day order (2AM) w/ PC Warehouse using their 1-800 number, paying for rush shipping and getting a Wacom ArtZ later that same day.
I've suffered through a lot of non-Wacom EMR styluses in the past, and my preference is to buy the real thing, so I'm okay with the status quo, unless there has been a marked improvement --- that said, who wants multiple stylus technologies? A big improvement in my life was getting the same Wacom EMR support on _all_ of my devices, so I can:
- make a note in MyScript Notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
- add it into a to-do notebook on my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft
- open the note in Nebo.app on my Samsung Book 3 Pro 360 for reference/editing
- work on the project on my MacBook using a Wacom One display
(and yes, there are times when I have all four devices out)
I couldn't count how many Wacom EMR styluses are scattered around my house or in various laptop bags....
If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.
The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.
If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.
> I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.
Ignoring for a moment the annoying software engineer tropes of "emotional=bad, logical=good" labeling and its unawareness of the fact that logic and emotions are hopelessly enmeshed; deciding what work to prioritize how you spend your limited time does not seem particularly "emotional."
So there's no point in wasting time on this, if perceived problems are low or nonexistent. Current maintainers probably look at it from a technical pov "it's just a name, who cares"
This cannot be, naming things is one of the two canonical hard problems.
It seems to me like you're viewing the playing of politics as a no-brainer, which is a very different mindset from a Linux contributor. I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.
“My approach is technically correct and I won’t change it even though it causes issues down the line”. I’ve seen this a lot in the Gnome/Wayland world.
> I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.
I’m not a kernel developer and the projects I’ve worked on haven’t even been that big, but even there it was necessary to cater to multiple stakeholders and consider multiple viewpoints. I’d go as far as saying that software development in general gets pretty political pretty quickly, as soon as you depend on somebody else’s work or somebody else depends on yours. Every decision will impact somebody and different options will do so differently - these are political considerations.
I can’t imagine this being less of an issue in the kernel.
So it will take valuable developer time that might be better utilized to work on something else. And even if they do rename it, there isn't any guarantee that the other vendors would then agree to collaborate.
My point is that from a developers PoV, renaming is not an evident net-gain at all-- might be seen as pointless branding busywork that leeches ressources from "actual" problems.
That is not "being emotional", it's just different priorities.
comparing the cost (difficulty, complications, etc.) against the benefit of doing something before doing it seems quite logical.
It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.
Otherwise it would have been smoother
Considering how much effort we had to out into fixing pipelines because of hardcoded scripts, and the lack of good reason to do it its no surprise that it was scoffed at. White keyboard warriors needed to make a change, but couldn't do anything meaningful as it would require actually doing something.
At least this change makes sense.
It certainly helped GNOME whom was one of the biggest proponents /s
I'm generally in favor of DEI, btw, so you can lose me with your bigotry.
Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
This was something I knew to be true in my much more limited circle, but I very much appreciate the real life bigger example.
It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.
But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny.
They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.
To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?"
An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."
Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.
It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.
Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...
And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.
Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpose?
Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.
Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.
Thankfully the actual code remained the same (because only engineers look at it).
Indeed, neither has any technical reason.
I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.
** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.
BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.
The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.
In recent memory, you see this in response to last decade's trend of white people wearing Native American headdresses (particular to certain remaining groups of indigenous people in North America) at fashion shows and public events. This was practically the definition of cultural appropriation; in the cultures which display headdresses, one must earn the right to do so, and here you had the descendants of those who committed actual genocide wearing these symbols without even an attempt to understand their significance.
This is in a country that not only practiced genocide, it stole the children of native peoples, ostensibly to educate them to European norms, to cut them off from their hereditary culture; including their language and clothing. It's also a country that continues to ignore its own treaties with indigenous nations and erase their history through "termination" (the policy of un-recognizing individual tribes to eliminate their status).
So maybe it's popular here because this country is particularly terrible at appropriating culture. There's a ton of nuance you might miss if you don't live here and talk to people.
You can continue to use Wacom (only)
but open source will never have such sensible names. It'll probably be called something like Ujagu Flemble or Bananahead.
Would it work to give the Windows driver to an LLM and tell it to analyze it and write a Linux driver?
With enough patience and spit it should be possible to understand it. And AI can do it while we sleep.
Maybe people don't realize that this is very much within the capabilities of modern AI nowadays?
At $dayjob we have encountered people reverse engineering our driver with Claude and creating GitHub repos with pretty useful vibecoded tools and documentation.
Yes, the raw binaries of the driver. Not leaked source code or anything like that.
I wrote a Python script to do it using xsetwacom, but I don't know if it would work for anybody else. I don't know if xsetwacom is only for wacom tablets, or if xsetwacom is only for X11 (I'm not on Wayland yet).
It's just another reason why Wayland isn't ready for daily use.
I've suffered through a lot of non-Wacom EMR styluses in the past, and my preference is to buy the real thing, so I'm okay with the status quo, unless there has been a marked improvement --- that said, who wants multiple stylus technologies? A big improvement in my life was getting the same Wacom EMR support on _all_ of my devices, so I can:
- make a note in MyScript Notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
- add it into a to-do notebook on my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft
- open the note in Nebo.app on my Samsung Book 3 Pro 360 for reference/editing
- work on the project on my MacBook using a Wacom One display
(and yes, there are times when I have all four devices out)
I couldn't count how many Wacom EMR styluses are scattered around my house or in various laptop bags....