[Design-team] Building Brand Together

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On 06/10/2009 08:47 AM, William Jon McCann wrote:
> If I were working on a KDE desktop that is based on Fedora packages
> the first thing I would do is make sure I differentiate it from Fedora
> since Fedora is a GNOME based project - and that is not going to
> change.

GNOME is not upstream for Fedora in it's entirety. Without GNOME, there 
would still be a viable Fedora Project. Where did you get the impression 
Fedora is a GNOME based project?

Did and does this project not base itself on all of our passion and 
dedication to Free Software? Would you say Fedora is a Apache based 
project because Apache is the default webserver application?

Rather then looking at which is the best or superior desktop environment 
and should thus be default for the Fedora distribution, which is the 
most unlikely way of how the default desktop environment is going to 
change, we've seen initiatives at giving the user more and cleaner 
options to choose from either available DE, but it seems fans from 
either side continue to struggle with the sorting, positioning, default 
radio button selection and stuff like that possibly giving one DE more 
chance of being selected by the user then another DE. But letting the 
user choose right in the beginning is still just one idea. I'm very 
interested in learning about new ways and ideas to increase the option 
value for the users.

Spins in this aspect let users experience one DE, or several DEs, and 
let spin maintainers build the optimal show-case for what such a DE 
could look like. I think the KDE spin in this regard has been one of the 
most outstanding examples of building a show-case spin exactly doing 
what is the purpose of spins to begin with; be a show-case whether it is 
on a desktop environment or Electronic Labs.

> Eventually, the Fedora board will realize that today's conception of
> spins is a failed experiment and force this change.  I'd encourage
> projects based on Fedora to do this voluntarily before this occurs.
>

Today's conception of spins is not a failed experiment although maybe in 
your opinion it doesn't meet your personal needs and/or expectations; 
today's conception of spins is still in continuous development having 
improved a *lot* since it's first initiation.

Tomorrow's conception of spins will likely be better, just like any 
other thing developing. Maybe I'm supposed to say something clever about 
KDE 4's recent development history here.

Now am I correct to understand you are suggesting that we should 
differentiate more then calling a Fedora KDE spin just "Fedora KDE 
Spin", such as by calling it something different, like maybe "Kedora"? 
Would that not create yet another brand? Would that not move away from 
Fedora and make *edora sound like *buntu, which has become how many 
people now refer to the project largely subsidized by Canonical?

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip