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Comment by switz | Hacker News Reader

While the name is not perfect, I don't believe it is as dramatic as you are making it out to be

http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz

If you're Joel Spolsky you can release a piece of software with any name you care to choose and people will still take it seriously because you have earned the respect of your peers. Other people who don't have decades of experience producing exceptional software don't have the same luxury.

Fogbugz is a terrible name and if an unknown developer had released it there's a good chance too few people would have looked at it for it to get the necessary traction it needed to succeed. It really isn't an example of something people should follow.

Also, people who can't pronounce voiced consonants at the end of syllables (such as german, dutch, french people) can't help but hear it as FuckBugs.

"Ve still neet a buck trecker, I vas finking about Jira, or do you haef a better idea?" "Yes, I recommend FuckBugs!"

To be fair though, FuckBugs would be a brilliant name for a bug tracker.

Let's build it.

In BrainFuck.

FogBugz was released in Nov 2000. How big was Joel Spolsky then? (It's before my time.) It looks like Joel was hardly blogging when FogBugz was released ( http://joelonsoftware.com/backIssues.html )

To be fair, as early as 2004 he had this to say on the name:

"Yeah, it's not an ideal name... But the brand equity is already worth significantly more than the cost of having a yucky name... (There was a period for about 6 months when "Z" was all the rage. Antz, Dogz, and Atomz come to mind)."

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