On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Martin Schlander wrote:
Torsdag 13 juli 2006 13:49 skrev houghi:
Great news. Not so much the name, but taking away the confusion.
You think this will end confusion?
- Many of us have been trying to explain to people that the distro is SUSE Linux for the last 10 months. These people are going to be confused.
- Many people have been running SUSE Linux for years, but don't follow the news - they're going to be confused when they go to the store and the retail box says "openSUSE".
I agree totally. I am not sure what to say about this news.
- I already anticipate a lot of people being confused about non-oss being available on the openSUSE dvd (assuming that'll still be the case on 10.2). And we'll still have to do a lot of explaining. Most people will expect that "open" means pure open source.
- There's a huge infrastructure of forums, websites, irc-channels etc. that will be obsoleted and have to change their names. Probably some of those won't change their domain name - that will cause confusion too.
- On the short term any name change will cause confusion - after all most people know that SUSE Linux is the correct name.
I think this is an other marketing ployee. I really prefered the SUSE Linux name. Now I am not sure what to think. I think this may cause more problems than it solves.
Besides this namechange makes me feel like SLED/S is the "real" SUSE - and SL/openSUSE is lowest priority (kind of the same feeling I had when the package management changes were forced through after feature freeze), I expect a lot of other people will also see this as a sign of SL getting lower priority - which can harm the distro.
Also hereby a lot of the history that SUSE name had is lost. The name is also too long. In other words - I don't like it.
Furthermore the namechange will steal attention from the community project. People will think openSUSE is just the name of the distro - and noone will know or care about the project.
ALL the people I know who actually use SUSE would have preferred to keep that name. All the people I know who likes openSUSE don't know what it's about - and don't use SUSE Linux.
All in all I think this decision is made 100% for the benefit of SLED/S - with little or no consideration for the many, many loyal and active SUSE Linux users.
Current mood: Don't know whether to cry or break something.
+2
To be fair I do see some benefits: - Maybe now we can have everything on one server - unlike both ftp.opensuse.org and ftp.suse.com
- A lot of people seem to like the name - hence it's been so damn hard trying to explain to these goofballs it's not the name of the distro. However I believe most of these people liked the name because they thought that openSUSE was non-Novell and 100% non-oss - and something different than SUSE Linux - and for some reason they liked that idea.
I just hope this is not a signal that our beloved SUSE Linux is becoming a lower priority. I found it very consistent from bottom to top. Now I am not really sure. I was able to start companies off with SUSE Linux and move them to SLES. Now I am afraid this is going to confuse them and make it harder to get customer to move up from openSUSE Linux to SLES. Having everything the same name made for a consistency. Well we will have to wait and see if this helps or hinders the cause. -- Boyd Gerber <gerberb@zenez.com> ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory-help@opensuse.org