fun with naming

[Christopher Blizzard]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 08:57 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
>> I really think you guys are over-thinking or over-rationalizing things. 
> 
> Ha!  And this from the guy who started it all.  I just dragged it into a
> stand-alone thread. :)

Hey, I give no guarantees of being consistent. :)

> Just so we're clear, you think it is OK and/or preferable to call all
> these things "Fedora":
> 
> * The group of packages that are the core set for the distribution
> * The individual slices of those packages that fulfill certain purposes,
> such as "server", "desktop", "audio workstation", "OS for OLPC", etc.
> * Parts of the project that do not directly involve software packages
> (art, marketing, ambassadors, etc.)
> * The overall project that houses many, many things, including a Linux
> distribution

You're going to hate this but I think the answer is "it depends."  I 
thought that we were talking about the thing-that-we-release.  I think 
that we need to release something called "Fedora 7".  There might be a 
desktop version or a server version, but it's all still based around 
this one product name.

> As a reminder, the "fun with naming" that you started was about finding
> a name to easily identify the core set of packages.  Even if this name
> is not used much outside of the project, it might be nice to have a way
> to refer to that.
> 
> "Put it into Fedora."
> "Get it from Fedora."
> "What is Fedora?"
> 
> It is the last question that worries me.  When the answer is different
> depending on the audience and the context of the question, then we are
> in the same Ambiguousland that we've been in all along.  Are we happy
> being there?

Brands are messy.  How you use them doesn't have to be.  For example 
"get it into Fedora" might mean getting into the livecd or might mean 
getting it into the whole package universe.  We could talk about the 
Fedora Universe to mean all the packages.  But I was mostly worried 
about we release to the world with all the hubub that entails.  I really 
believe that something simple and elegant is a good choice for that, 
even if there's desktop and server, etc.

--Chris