Re: Is our name confusing people....

[David Chisnall]

On 17 Nov 2010, at 17:31, Nicola Pero wrote:

> Dropping an established brand name is terribly expensive and wasteful.
> No matter how good the new name is, I don't think it would compensate for
> the loss. ;-)

Agreed.  I think changing the name would confuse people.  We don't have a great 
deal of visibility, but we have some and changing the name would be 
counterproductive in increasing that.

> But, if you want to appeal and communicate to modern audiences, we can 
> launch new "products" or "projects" or "packages" or "initiatives"
> or whatever you want to call them - they could still be under the GNUstep 
> brand umbrella but can have new names or presentations and appeal to different
> audiences or communicate differently (even if the "content" is actually very
> much simply a subset of GNUstep, maybe repackaged!).  Companies do things 
> like these 
> all the time, no reason why we can't do the same. :-)

Agreed.  There's nothing stopping us for having more catchy names for 
subprojects.  I'd avoid Cocoa or derivatives, because we don't want to step on 
Apple's trademarks.  They've not gone after Cocotron that we know of, but 
that's no reason not to be careful.  

I wouldn't object to a little bit of restructuring of our core frameworks (e.g. 
sorting out the Foundation / CoreFoundation relationship) and giving the new 
frameworks more buzzword-compliant names, because I doubt many people not on 
this list think about -base or -gui as anything other than GNUstep Foundation 
and GNUstep AppKit (if they think of them at all).

I'd also avoid Moka (sorry Riccardo) because coffee-related names sound like 
they are talking about Java.  In fact, Mocha was often used to refer to the 
(long deprecated) Cocoa-Java bridge, so it would be a very confusing name for 
us.  Earl Grey would be safe and non-confusing, but also quite a silly name.

David

-- Send from my Jacquard Loom