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SUSE Linux Becomes openSUSE
houghi writes "With the anouncement of the release of SUSE Linux 10.2 Alpha 2 there is also an anouncement that SUSE Linux will be renamend to openSUSE.
A very logical step to clear things up. The name went from S.u.S.E over SuSE to SUSE Linux and for many people it was not clear what the name realy was. It also points out the importance Novell gives the the openness of the whole openSUSE project."
I could swear that it's been called that for a little while now. I downloaded it a few weeks ago, and it was reffered to as "openSUSE" on their website then. Old news?
Summary is a bit misleading....
With current naming we experienced confusion internally and externally
between the project openSUSE and the distribution created there. And
especially with the new naming of our Linux business products (SUSE
Linux Enterprise 10) the differentiation between our business products
and community/consumer product is not intuitive. Therefor the upcoming
community/consumer version will be named openSUSE 10.2. We'll
implement first name changes with Alpha 3 starting directly after
Alpha 2 and will have a fully renamed distribution with Beta 1 in Nov.
The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 are keeping their names.
This seems to illustrate yet again the issues Novell has had for the last decade with their product marketing - how can they develop brand loyalty when they keep changing the product names?
Had they left the Novell Linux Desktop name and replaced the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Novell Linux Server or Novell Linux Enterprise Server, wouldn't they have been able to distinguish the community versions against the enterprise versions much easier?
Novell's seemingly quarterly change in nomenclature and direction is baffling.
I now feel better about my decision to consider possibly maybe eventually switching to openSuSE.
Does this mean that the following will no longer be bundled and have to be downloaded separately?
- Real Player
- Planmaker
- Textmaker
- Java (and dependent packages)
- Opera]
- ATI drivers
- NVidia drivers
Yeah, I know, CD #6 contains some of the extras, but it sure is nice to get them all on one DVD like the retail SuSE has offered. It's more convenient than OpenSuSE has been.
I've been buying the retail version of SuSE for a few years now, and really like it, even with the problems the distribution has had from time to time. I hope that this move doesn't change anything for the worse.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"Software und SystemEntwicklung" = "Software and System Development" in German.
Yeah, capitalization is important. It's the difference between "I helped Uncle Jack off his horse" and "I helped uncle jack off his horse".
The "confusion" I was referring to was in terms of spelling. FireFox is misspelled. Firefox is spelled correctly. When people are used to mixed case, they can get confused as to whether a particular name is spelled with conventional (just one capital) rules, camel case, rules from another language (as another poster pointed out, the original S.u.S.E. capitalization comes from German). "I know one of the letters in SUSE isn't capitalized, which one is it?"
When I'm writing formally, I still can't decide what to do with names like iMac, eBay, etc. at the beginning of a sentence -- and those are names I know how to spell.
So no, I'm not saying that people calling it "FireFox" get confused by people calling it "Firefox." You could probably write "Fyrefawkes" and still get the idea across. But the large number of mixed-case names in the computing field has led to confusion about how the name is spelled.
As it is, I think making the "open" part lowercase is still asking for trouble, but "openSUSE" is at least a bit more standard than "openSuSE." Me, I would have gone for "OpenSUSE" or even "Open SUSE."