On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 4:20 AM, Otso
Hello,
This issue shouldn't be unfamiliar to people following this mailing list. Even enthusiasts on this list tend to shorten openSUSE to oS, OS, os or plain suse. I do not know how valuable openSUSE is as a brand name, or how affected Novell is with it, but please consider these points before trashing the idea of renaming: 1) openSUSE is pain to pronounce understandably for non-native english speakers. I experienced this first time lately when trying to explain what distro I'm using to an american person face-to-face. I had thought I had perfect pronouncication. Even for native speakers, it's a mouthful. 2) It's even worse to write. SMS'ing someone to install Gentoo is easier than telling them to get openSUSE. Same applies to fast IRC/MSN/Facebook etc chattings, and BBS's + chans. It's a pain. 3) Plain SUSE doesn't exist. There's SLED/SLES, and then there's openSUSE. Reverting back to good old SUSE is thus an option. Make it officially something like SUSE Linux Community Edition (SLiCE... just came up with that one btw!) 4) Does it actually need an obvious referrer to rest of SUSE family? Fedora doesn't have referrer to RedHat (aside fedora being a hat, which isn't obvious for ~5 billion humans). We could just shorten it to Opsus, Osus, Suso or something similar. New shorter name from scratch, with some referrer to origins? Why not. 5) As long as it's easy to say, write, remember and isn't insulting in any language, it'll also be globally accessible, searchable and mentionable with a lot less hassle.
The only problem I find with openSUSE spelling is the initial letter lowercase. I find this hard at times to backspace and correct when my word-processor has auto-converted the first letter (o) to upper case. I have seen this complaint from some other journalists as well. Apart from that "SUSE" has a great brand image and we should stick with it. Even Novell Linux Desktop was renamed into "SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop" to make use of the SUSE brand, so nothing wrong with we sticking to it. -- Sankar P http://psankar.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org