[Mageia-discuss] origin of the name "mageia"?

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 17:30 +0100, Maurice Batey a écrit :
> I must have missed some posting that explains "mageia"!
> 
> What is the origin of this name, please?

There was some peoples ( primarily people at the origin of the fork )
who proposed some names ( I estimated to 40/50 proposal ), and then we
removed all that were not suitable :

- already used on .org domain name ( nebula, for example )

- unsuitable because it was too funny and not professional, ie mostly
private joke in French ( tartopom, for example ).

- trademarked by checking inpi.fr for the various class of use we wanted
( ie, while having a name trademarked for wine was not a issue, a name
used in book edition could have been ), for example, toucan was
proposed, but this is trademarked in France.

- trademarked in the rest of the world.

- already used by a old linux distribution, ( diamond linux )

- too similar to some big name in computing field ( ubun3 )

- already used by another software or company ( nexodus ) without being
trademarked

- already used by people who could have enough money to sue ( mango )
even in a different domain

- unsuitable and seen as offensive in languages we check ( of course,
with 6900 languages on the planet, chances are high that every possible
name can be funny for at least one person, but problem is when there is
a lot more than one ), for example mirably ( too similar to miserably )

- not refused by ennael ( as I proposed ennalinux :)  )

- not too similar to Mandriva stuff ( some people proposed BlueBird,
which I liked a lot, except this was the codename of Mandrake 8.2, and
traktopel, which was 8.0 )

- not too long

- implicitly, we also tried to avoid everything outside of ascii ( even
if some people proposed a chinese name, they will recognize
themselves ). I say implictly because almost everything was ascii. 

We also tried to get a name which could be used for design ( ie, we try
to avoid turd linux ), with name not already taken everywhere, with .com
availiable, and with a possible good catch phrase but we had to relax
theses checks, as the twitter account was not available, and as the .com
domain name was already taken ( but that's not a issue, IMHO ). And I
think no one thought of the design/catchphrase stuff in the last run.

And so basically, after removing more than 95% of the various proposals,
only 2 names survived after the selection. And we voted to keep one
( and no, I will keep the other one secret ).

Of course, this explanation is less sexy than the other one about "this
come from greek", which are true too, but I want to highlight that
choosing a name is neither easy or as fun as it sound. And that we
didn't start by saying "wow, greek is a cool language, let's find a word
from it".

-- 
Michael Scherer