In a school project, we are supposed to use maven enabled project. Maven is a great system for managing dependencies, so I'm quite happy I'll finally learn to use it.

However I already started project as Netbeans project and I'm now struggling how to reconfigure it. When creating the project IDE advised me to call it `com.myname`. This resulted in redundant empty folder `com/myname/{sources start here}`. Windows explorer isn't as smart as GitHub and doesn't skip empty folder which makes it very annoying.

I'm strongly considering that I'll call the project just `myname`. Is that valid? What are the risks of breaking this convention? Where did this convention come from and what does `com` abbreviation mean?