> 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.
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.
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.
comparing the cost (difficulty, complications, etc.) against the benefit of doing something before doing it seems quite logical.