I know open source folks don't consider branding important, to the point they intentionally give their projects stupid names for the "irony" and so on, but I don't even have this key on my keyboard, and I don't even know how to say this. Mewjee? Mewg? Ug? Come on, folks, you can do better.
Whether you know it or not, this has an actual effect on the ability of the project to spread by word of mouth (online or otherwise), therefore its success and number of contributors it'll get.
μTorrent seems to do fine with the Mu, even though most people write it as "uTorrent" and spell it as such.
You've said it yourself there; μTorrent was rebranded by the majority of users to uTorrent, and "uTorrent" is a distinct, mostly spelt-how-it-sounds and easily-Googleable name.
I doubt that an involuntary rebranding of μg to "ug" would be quite as successful, nor likely to happen.
The funny thing is that in Modern Greek the letter μ is pronounced "me", so the name of the software could be pronounced "meTorrent". Spelling it with a u makes the name of the software sound like "youTorrent".
Its a ballache though, especially in 8.1 (u1) with classic start. Press the first letter and get a list of programs that start with that letter? U doesn't bring it up. Because it doesn't start with a U.
This has an actual effect on the ability of the project to spread by word of mouth (online or otherwise), therefore its success and number of contributors it'll get
I completely agree with you.
"What's that you're using?"
"Microgram, I think. It's cool, you should check it out"
sound of frantic typing
"I can't find it on Google, how do you spell it?"
Variants on the above conversation happen every day.
Adopting a name like μg only places petty and annoying barriers in front of potential users.
I thought the same. Branding can make or break the success of a project. I think OSS is no exception. Patio11 wrote a great piece on the branding of Heartbleed. [1]
Here on Hacker News, I momentarily mistook "µg" for "pg". So I thought Paul Graham was making an announcement about APIs for Android. If that had been intentional, it could have been a homograph attack.
Whether you know it or not, this has an actual effect on the ability of the project to spread by word of mouth (online or otherwise), therefore its success and number of contributors it'll get.