[Mageia-dev] Art, Logo and Branding

Michael Scherer misc at zarb.org
Thu Sep 23 23:58:30 CEST 2010


Le jeudi 23 septembre 2010 à 16:17 -0400, Marc Paré a écrit :
> I think in the grand scheme of things, we should all acknowledge that 
> should the name "Mageia" not work, that a name change would be a 
> possibility, just as a logo change is still a possibility. We have seen 
> this from many OSS firms who went through this process.

How do you assess that it is the name that do not work and that's not
anything else ? 

> We should be careful in making the distro too "cottagey" or "home grown" 
> in looks and flavour. I would suggest that the long term vision for the 
> distro also include a commercial aspect. There should be a community 
> driven distro and a commercial distro (read server). 

I fear that this scheme does look like too much the one that caused
problem in the past within Mandriva community, with contradictions
between the community nature and the more commercial version. 

How would you ensure that the community version will not be seen as a
cheap version of the commercial one ? How would you prevent this idea
from destroying again the community like it did by the past ?

If theses questions are not solved, I think all attempts to redo the
mistakes of the past are bound to recreate the failures of the past.
And I think that none of us think that's a desirable outcome. 

All people who I asked the question said that the only solution is to
have 2 different names and brandings.
Redhat do it, and it work fine from them.
Novell do it, and it work fine.
Canonical do it ( to a lesser extend , since there was
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375345 ), and it work
fine.

Even debian based distro used a different name ( progeny, etc ).

We didn't for Mandriva, and so started the confusion between the
company, the distribution and the community. And so people didn't
contribute because it was a business, and the idea that "updates were
not free" stick around for a long time because it was hard to explain to
people the different concept

So if there is a business or commercial version, I think this would
requires a different name and branding. Using the association name for
that would not be right, in my opinion. 

-- 
Michael Scherer



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