On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 10:27:38PM +0200, 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?

No. It will lessen the 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.

The fact that we needed to explain should be a HUGE hint of how confusing
it was. The majority of users still can't get it right.

> - 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".

No, they won't. If they have been running SUSE for years, they will have
at least heard the name openSUSE and the link with SUSE and Novell. What
you sugest is the same as saying people might be confused about the Novell
logo on SUSE.

> - 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.

Well, if such confusion would exist, we would have heard a LOT about it
right now, as that is how the system already works in 10.1. The few pwople
who are realy concerned by the complete openness or not of a distro will
not buy it because it says open in the name. 

> - 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.

Ever heard of re-directions?

> - On the short term any name change will cause confusion - after all most 
> people know that SUSE Linux is the correct name.

It won't be the correct name after 10.2 Beta 3. And don't you remember the
days that is was called S.u.S.E, or SuSE or just SUSE instead of SUSE
Linux? 

> 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. 

The fact that people see this difference is already happening. I hear
people taling about buying SLED instead of downloading 10.1 for whatever
reason. I can not understand why that is a bad thing. Giving money to the
people who develope openSUSE can not be a bad thing. I just hope that all
of that extra money flows back to the developers. :-)

> 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.  

Ah, now we are at the real issue. You don't like it. Well, I don't like it
either, yet it is the best option in this situation.

> 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.

I doubt it. I think it will draw MORE attention to the site and therefore
more people will be learning about openSUSE. Then it is up to us (not
Novell) to make it interesting enough for people to hang on.

On that note, I hope Firefox and other browsers will point to openSUSE by
default intead of Novell.com

> 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 the people I know who use SUSE AND the people I see posting prefere
openSUSE. All the other people are confused by the two names gfor what
they think is the same thing.

> 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.

I again fail to see how this should be a bad thing. More money means
ongoing developement for openSUSE.

> Current mood: Don't know whether to cry or break something.

For me the cuurent mode is a hangover, but that has nothing to do with
SUSE or openSUSE. On that matter I am happy.

> 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

Also, yes.

> - 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. 

Why would all these goofballs need this explanation? If you need
explaining something that abovious over and over again, then perhaps the
goofballs are on to something. At first I also thought openSUSE was the
name of the new distro and you can look it up how often I went into
discussion that the distro was NOT openSUSE but SUSE.

> 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.

So you rather have people believe something that is not true?

My prefered choice would have been that openSUSE was never used and that
it would have been SuSE (note even SUSE Linux) for the rest of time. That
has not happend and no matter how I dream in my sleep about this, we must
deal with reality. The reality is that there is a lot of confusion between
SUSE Linux, SUSE and openSUSE. That means to find a solution to remove
that confusion. What we tried and failed with is explaing it to peope over
and over and over again.

Giving it the name of openSUSE was and is the best option as was already
sugested with 10.0, I believe). Don't look back, look forward.
-- 
houghi  Please do not toppost                   http://houghi.org
You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of 
sight and  sound but of mind.  A journey into a  wondrous land of 
imagination. Next stop, Usenet

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