Comment by bob1029

Comment by bob1029 2 days ago

24 replies

I would have stood my ground on the first name longer. Make these legal teams do some actual work to prove they are serious. Wait until you have no other option. A polite request is just that. You can happily ignore these.

The 2nd name change is just inexcusable. It's hard to take a project seriously when a random asshole on Twitter can provoke a name change like this. Leads me to believe that identity is more important than purpose.

3rodents 2 days ago

The first name and the second name were both terrible. Yes, the creator could have held firm on "clawd" and forced Anthropic to go through all the legal hoops but to what end? A trademark exists to protect from confusion and "clawd" is about as confusing as possible, as if confusing by design. Imagine telling someone about a great new AI project called "clawd" and trying to explain that it's not the Claude they are familiar with and the word is made up and it is spelled "claw-d".

OpenClaw is a better name by far, Anthropic did the creator a huge favor by forcing him to abandon "clawd".

  • calgoo 2 days ago

    Interesting, I dont read claude the same way as clawd, but I'm based in Spain so I tend to read it as French or Spanish. I tend to read it as `claud-e` with an emphasis on the e at the end. I would read clawd as `claw-d` with a emphasis in the D, but yes i guess American English would pronounce them the same way.

    Edit: Just realized i have been reading and calling it after Jean-Claude Van Damme all this time. Happy friday!

    • marton78 2 days ago

      What do you mean an emphasis on the 'e'? As in claudé? The name Claude is pronounced with a silent 'e' in French, there is no 'e' to emphasize.

      • esafak 2 days ago

        Now you're telling me I've been pronouncing it wrong in every possible case?!

    • browningstreet 2 days ago

      Greg Eisenberg will pronounce it both ways in the same video: clawd and cload. As an American I very much use clawd for Claude.

kube-system 2 days ago

As the article says, it’s a 2 month old weekend project. It’s doing a lot better than my two month old weekend projects.

  • superfrank 2 days ago

    While weekend project may be correct, I think it gives a slightly wrong impression of where this came from. Peter Steinberger is the creator who created and sold PSPDFKit, so he never has to work again. I'm listening to a podcast he was on right now and he talks about staying up all night working on projects just because he's hooked. According to him made 6,600 commits in January alone. I get the impression that he puts more time into his weekend project than most of us put into our jobs.

    That's not to diminish anything he's done because frankly, it's really fucking impressive, but I think weekend project gives the impression of like 5 hours a week and I don't think that's accurate for this project.

    • suddenlybananas 2 days ago

      Number of commits doesn't mean much.

      • superfrank 2 days ago

        I get what you're saying, but I don't totally agree. The number is sooo high that, while it isn't a perfect measure, I think it does mean something.

        If you go look at his code, nearly all of them are under 100 lines and I'd say close to half are under 10. So you're totally right that that number is way higher than what most other developers would have for a similar amount of code. At the same time, if we assume it takes 30 seconds to make a commit on average that's still 55 hours in a month, that is way above what most would call a weekend project.

        My point wasn't really that number of commits is some perfect measure of developer productivity. It was just that if you're actually building something and not just generating commits for the hell of it, there's a minimum amount of time needed for each commit. 6600 times whatever that minimum time is is probably more than what most people would think of for a weekend project.

        • egeozcan 2 days ago

          I don't disagree with you but those commits could also be automated. Have a look at the projects like gastown.

Jarwain 2 days ago

I draw the opposite conclusion. Willingness to change the name leads me to conclude purpose is more important than identity.

Now if it changes _again_ that's a different story. If it changes Too Much, it becomes a distraction

  • altmanaltman 2 days ago

    Isnt this name change because the previous one was hard to say, as per the blog post? Isnt that a case of focusing more on identity than purpose?

    • Veen 2 days ago

      More that moltbot is ugly and was chosen in a bit of a panic after Anthropic complained. No one liked it, including the people who chose it.

arrowsmith 2 days ago

It wasn't just one random asshole, tons of people were saying that "Moltbot" is a terrible name. (I agree, although I didn't tweet at him about it.)

OpenClaw is a million times better.

  • matsemann 2 days ago

    Just curious, is there something specific about Moltbot that makes it a terrible name? Like any connotations or associations or something? Non-native speaker here, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with it that would warrant the hate it's gotten. (But I agree that OpenClaw _sounds_ better)

    • arrowsmith 2 days ago

      No connotations or associations that I can think of it. It just sounds weird and is kinda hard to pronounce - doesn't roll off the tongue easily.

      It's not the worst thing ever, it's just not a very aesthetically pleasing combination of sounds.

    • esskay 2 days ago

      Go on twitter and search 'maltbot', 'moldbot', 'multbot', etc - the name was just awful and easy to get wrong as its meaningless. I think the crux of it is that 'Molt' isnt a very commonly used word for most people so it just feels weird and wrong.

      OpenClaw just sounds better, it's got that opensource connotation and just generally feels like a real product not a weirdly named thing you'll forget about in 5 minutes because you cant remember the name.

    • dist-epoch 2 days ago

      In many non-English languages it's a terrible name to pronounce. the T-B letters link in particular. Not all languages have silent letters like English, you actually have to pronounce them.

      • llbbdd 2 days ago

        Every single letter in Moltbot would be pronounced in English.

currymj 2 days ago

Anthropic already was using "Clawd" branding as the name for the little pixelated orange Claude Code mascot. So they probably have a trademark even on that spelling.