“What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Juliet, Act II, scene ii.
Variant: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Source: Romeo and Juliet (1595)
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William Shakespeare699
English playwright and poet 1564–1616Related quotes
Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson
Speech, March 26, 1966, Washington, D.C., quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)
Context: While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas.
In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term "open source software" instead of "free software" to describe what they do. The term "open source" quickly became associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are today separate movements with different views and goals, although we can and do work together on some practical projects.
The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.
“Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”
Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose
Source: The Name of the Rose

“We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) Scottish poet, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve
The Little White Rose
Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 15
Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist
Quote of the week #8 – Monbiot: "looks like I’ve boobed" http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/17/quote-of-the-week-8-monbiot-looks-like-ive-boobed/, wattsupwiththat.com, May 17, 2009. <br class="br">2009
“Where a man calls himself by a name which is not his name, he is telling a falsehood.”
William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher (1815–1899) British lawyer, judge and politician
Reddaway v. Banham (1895), L. R. 2 Q. B. D. [1895], p. 293.