Am 16. Juli 2024 22:37:03 MESZ schrieb Christian Boltz <opensuse@cboltz.de>:
>The rebranding idea asks the whole openSUSE community to shoot in its
>foot, using a very big gun. It shouldn't be a surprise that I can only
>decline that request with "bad idea, no thanks".
>
>
>Regards,
>
>Christian Boltz


Honestly, I do think that it is important to acknowledge in honesty that as it stands openSUSE has much more to lose from a rebranding than it has to gain and for anyone who argues differently, I would love to hear the reasonings for that.
The reason why there is much to lose should be pretty obvious. Loss of name recognition for a distro, that while it isn't ultra popular, is still fairly well known and considered one of the older longstanding distros (even if it isn't actually one distro). Lots of past references, videos etc on the internet that uninformed people might stumble across referencing "openSUSE" might suddenly become hard to parse and people might be more likely to find something SUSE related than our project when googling the term, which probably isn't in SUSE's interest just as the current brand confusion isn't.

This comes at a time when there are as we speak discussions about less and less maintainers and a dysfunctional leadership/project structure. So if we ditched the brand recognition on top of that, it might get even more difficult to recruit fresh new blood.

So with that in mind, if we assume that there is no directly pressing need to rebrand, it seems we would have much more to gain from trying to enact some internal changes first. If we could make some credible changes to create a more welcoming, functional and pleasant community, we could also use that as a springboard to launch a rebrand with a purpose. Instead of doing a rebrand because we had to I guess, we could use it to advertise an openSUSE/whatever-it-will-be that is trying to do things differently and wants to reach    out and be welcoming to more people. I think that would have a much better chance of a positive outcome.

The logic of "better do it now before a new owner forces us to" also doesn't track entirely for me, because even a narrative of "our new corporate sponsor doesn't like us as much anymore, so we're now forced to be more independent" might be more positive PR for a relaunch than "well they kinda asked us to do it but they're actually still totally cool with us. Trust us."

I don't think any of that should mean we should just totally ignore what SUSE apparently is politely asking for. It is still a very understandable ask from their perspective. But I think the only reasonable answer here can be a compromise. "We acknowledge that a rebrand might be what's asked for, but it's not exactly hitting us at a good spot and we need time to build out something that has actual purpose". Maybe take baby steps. Try to make internal changes and do smaller external changes whenever we feel we have achieved something positive. Maybe, if possible, just change the name OR the logo first, so there is a way to at least somewhat bridge over some of the brand recognition and differentiate ourselves without going over the deep end immediately and entirely. Establish the new distro logos first for a bit and deephasize the openSUSE *a bit* instead of doing it as about the same time of the project rebrand. Return some of the good will SUSE is showing us by doing smaller changes and hope that will also be met with some good will and understanding that a hard fracture would be very damaging for us.