On Wednesday 14 July 2010 00:50:37 Otso wrote:
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.
I consider SUSE a good brand, we should not move away until the benefits are far superior than the hurts - like with the wiki migration, it hurts and there are for sure things we can do against that - but it's far superior, so worth it;) Fedora had a name before Red Hat bought the Fedoraproject - and they decided to stick with it. IMO it's too late in the game to change it, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126