Every time I want to start a new open-source project I come across this small “problem”: Making sure that the name for the project isn’t already taken. Today I decided to solve it by creating a simple script that queries different open-source repositories to check if there exists a project with the desired name.
Usage is quite simple:
$ name_taken.py enlightenment
Debian: Name not taken :-)
SourceForge: Name taken :-(
Currently the script is in early stage, and can search for projects in Debian’s list of packages and in SourceForge. The code is available is hosted in GitHub: https://github.com/guyru/name_taken, and licensed under GPL2 or higher. Suggestions on how to make this tool more useful (and of course patches) are really welcomed.