Dne pondělí 3. června 2019 11:59:45 CEST, Simon Lees napsal(a):
On 03/06/2019 18:05, Richard Brown wrote:
On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 08:02, Stasiek Michalski
wrote: From my point of view, there a number of benefits of renaming the openSUSE Project, especially when considering the announced-at-oSC intention to form an "openSUSE Foundation" to be a standalone legal entity representing the project. For any such entity to be fully autonomously functional, it will need to have at least some control/ownership/rights to it's own name & trademark. openSUSE's current name makes such things rather complicated. Trademarks are only enforceable if they're considered unique. Right now, we operate under a situation where both SUSE and openSUSE are owned by SUSE, therefore are considered 'unique'. This has some practical side effects - for example, with domain names. SUSE can't allow broad reuse of their mark without risking the enforceability of their primary SUSE trademark, therefore SUSE effectively have to register and own every possible *opensuse*.* domain that the Project or any of our ancillary communities use, in order to protect their overarching SUSE Trademark. SUSE does a great job of making such domains available for openSUSE's use under the current circumstances, but this occasionally leads to situations that are awkward and uncomfortable for all involved. For example, the openSUSE Indonesia community had to transfer the domain they registered to run their local community sites/mirrors to the control of SUSE, which no one really wanted to do and was logistically problematic given the details of how Indonesia's domain registry works. Figuring out how/whether the future Foundation could own/control any openSUSE domains is an open topic. Talking speculatively, based on casual conversations and no legal advice (yet), my personal expectation is that if the Project decides to keep operating under the name "openSUSE", then there is no way the Project will ever own the Trademark around the Project. While I'm confident SUSE will do all it can to support openSUSE in this area, we will all likely be limited in what we can do in the areas of naming, trademarks, sub-projects, domains, etc, as a result. Renaming the Project on the other hand would allow openSUSE to form it's foundation under that new name. Given the amicable and cooperative nature of our transition towards this 'less dependant' governance model, I can foresee a situation where, if the Project decides to rename, we operate under both the new and the old name for a period to avoid a too disruptive switch over from "openSUSE" to "whatever" - this worked pretty smoothly back in the days of SUSE Linux 10.0/10.1 which were produced "by openSUSE" for example. So despite the challenges and disruption that any rename could cause, I do see the benefits, especially around the trickier parts of the upcoming Foundation negotiations. That said, my view is only one. if the community is abhorrently against the idea of renaming, that's good to know, and the Board will factor in the feedback into our negotiations with SUSE as we work towards forming the Foundation. Either way, we really need to have a good understanding of what the community at large feel on this topic. If we don't have the discussion now, it will likely be too late once legal entities and agreements between SUSE & openSUSE are formalised. So whatever your views, please sound off in this thread, even if your view is already echoed by others. Do you think openSUSE should change it's name?
Shortly, no, despite all Richard's good arguments, no, I don't see it beneficial.
Again keeping it short, No, the board has been given quite some guarantee we will be able to continue to use openSUSE as long as we need / want. If that was to ever change and we no longer could i'd be all for creating a "fork" to a new name based off, "openSUSE is changing its name because it's working relationship with SUSE has come to the point were we feel we can no longer share the same name". This would generate more then enough press that whatever we change to will become instantly recognised, it would equally create enough bad press for SUSE that they would consider whether the choice is wise. But until that point comes hopefully it never does i'm all for keeping the existing name it is known and represents everything the project is so well
I fully agree here. I see the tight bound between openSUSE and SUSE as very beneficial. As explained elsewhere, the change would require huge amount of work and IMHO we already do have a lot of work to do, so I don't think the change is worth of the work needed. -- Vojtěch Zeisek Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/ https://trapa.cz/