[illumos-Discuss] branding for illumos/openindiana

[Albert Lee]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Blake <blake.irvin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone besides me feel that we need a more unified naming/branding
> approach for the community-driven descendants of OpenSolaris? I feel that
> the there is no obvious connection (for those new to the platform) between
> Illumos/OpenIndiana, which I think is counterproductive given that
> OpenIndiana is sort of the 'Fedora Core' of Illumos.
> Some possible names:
> Illumos Live
> Illumos Core
> Illumos [version_number] - [adjective] [animal]
>
>
>
>
> (kidding about the last one)
>
> I think OpenIndiana is great, I just don't think that the name 'Indiana'
> means anything to anyone and isn't very memorable.
>

I completely agree with that. The name is awkward as an adjective attached to a
piece of jargon, which predates illumos and made more sense when
the OpenSolaris distribution was still around.

However, I don't understand your "'Fedora Core' of Illumos" analogy in
the context of the relationship between illumos and OpenIndiana.
OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos similar to how Fedora is a
GNU/Linux distribution.

It is one of several distributions based on illumos, and its main
distinction is that it's the primary developer platform. Also,
"illumos Live" is already taken by Joyent's mini-distribution:
https://github.com/joyent/illumos-live

While there's already some degree of brand recognition for the
OpenIndiana name, a name that is easier to build associations with
(and isn't a mouthful) will definitely blow it away.

This has been brought up on multiple occasions but devolved into
bikeshedding, so perhaps we need a better approach.

-Albert