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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
ZENEZ   1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah  84047

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