Agreed. I'm the author of a fairly popular dev environment project. Every so often you get people turning up enraged because I chose a name that some other project once used. In the situation I'm talking about it makes even less sense than pip -- it's a command-line executable. There's no one repository (although doesn't seem like Debian people would agree with that!). There's a multitude of package managers on different platforms. Furthermore, in case people hadn't noticed, there are these things called languages, countries, and cultures. There is no reason in general why there might not be package managers whose use is culturally or geographically non-uniform and perhaps entirely unfamiliar to those in other countries. So, what's the plan for checking whether a name is "taken" across human culture, history, and computing platforms? Silly out-dated notion.