In this list, Richard ponders some points about this project name change to accommodate the future openSUSE foundation, covered in the text below:
From my point of view, there are a lot of benefits of renaming the
OpenSUSE project, especially when considering what is announced in oSC to form an openSUSE Foundation to be an entity representing the project.
For any entity that wishes to be fully autonomous and functional, it will be necessary to have at least some control / ownership / rights to its own name and trademark. The current name of openSUSE makes these things very complicated. Trademarks are applicable only if considered exclusive.
We currently operate in a situation where both SUSE and openSUSE are owned by SUSE and therefore considered 'exclusive'. This has some practical side effects – for example, with domain names. SUSE cannot allow extensive reuse of your trademark without risking the obligation of your main trademark of SUSE, so SUSE effectively has to register and own all possible * opensuse *. * domain that the Project or any of our ancillary communities use to protect your SUSE trademark.
SUSE does a great job of making these domains available for openSUSE to use under the current circumstances, but this occasionally leads to situations that are awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved. For example, the openSUSE Indonesian community had to transfer the domain they registered to run their local community sites / mirrors for SUSE control, which no one really wanted to do and was logistically problematic given the details of how to register a domain. in Indonesia. Find out how / if the future Foundation could own / control any of the openSUSE domains is an open topic.
Speaking speculatively, based on casual and unadvised conversations (yet), my personal expectation is that if the Project decides to continue operating under the name "openSUSE", then there is no way that the project will own the trademark surrounding the project. While I am confident that SUSE will do everything possible to support openSUSE in this area, we will all be limited in what we can do in the areas of naming, trademarks, subprojects, domains, etc., as a result.
Renaming the Project, on the other hand, would allow openSUSE to form the foundation under this new name. Given the friendly cooperative nature of our transition to this "less dependent" governance model, I can envisage a situation where, if the project decides to rename, we operate under the new and old name for a period to avoid a very disturbing change of "openSUSE" to "whatever" – this worked very well in the days of SUSE Linux 10.0 / 10.1 which were produced "by openSUSE" for example.
So despite the challenges and disruptions that any renaming could cause, I see the benefits, especially around the trickier parts of the Foundation's upcoming negotiations. That said, my opinion is only one, if the community opposes the idea of renaming, good to know, and the Board has this feedback as a factor in our dealings with SUSE as we work towards forming the Foundation.
Either way, we really need to have a good understanding of what the general community feels about this topic. If we don't have the discussion now, it will probably be too late once legal entities and agreements between SUSE and openSUSE are formalized.
So whatever your views, please sound out of this discussion even if your view is already echoed by others. Do you think openSUSE should change its name?
The link to the beginning of the mailing list you can access here. Already to see Richard's text in English, you can consult it here.
Now we want to know what you think about the possible creation of the openSUSE Foundation and the possible change of project name. Leave us comments what you think.
This article does not end here, keep exchanging an idea there in our forum.
Hope to see you next, a big hug
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