Naming & Rebranding Requirements

Special Discussions Project Discussions
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Making an informed decision about whether rebranding is a good idea requires an understanding of the resources required to handle this properly. This discussion should be focused on the work required to execute a successful rebranding of the project, including marketing, branding, and some of the costs involved.

The result of this discussion should be a list of ideas around the requirements for rebranding, which the board can then take back to SUSE in order to determine how much SUSE is willing to support the required effort. After the board’s discussion with SUSE, they will report back to the community.

It is very important for participants in this discussion to understand that discussion of specific names, logos, or other branding elements is being deferred and is not on-topic for this discussion. There are additional steps that need to be taken to vet potential names, avoid domain squatters, as well as to research trademarks and any other legal issues before presenting specific branding elements to the community for consideration. When a shortlist of potential names and/or branding elements has been generated, a new discussion topic will be opened to work through that list.

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A consideration that just strike me here is all around member benefits - we have the opensuse.org domain with e-mail addresses for project members, and there are things that are tied to those addresses - including the fact that those addresses were set up with the intention of being available long-term.

A change here is going to have a pretty big impact for the project membership, as a result.

A couple other considerations come to mind:

  1. Search results and SEO - for things like the wiki, documentation, and even these forums, mailing lists, and other community spaces will be impacted, not just in terms of user access, but in terms of searchability using $SEARCH_ENGINE_OF_CHOICE
  2. Cross-linking and forwarding/redirects between sites will be broken pretty badly without some redirection infrastructure being put in place, and those can be difficult to set up (I did some work on a documentation migration project several years ago, and the change in platform meant we couldn’t remap all pages effectively, which broke a lot of external links to the documentation, including from bug tracking systems, customer support systems, etc. There are always things that get missed with this type of migration)

I’m sure there are others that don’t come to mind right now, just around DNS issues.

In some respects, the actual rebranding effort of sub-projects (distros, tools like openQA and OBS) is the “easy” part, technically, to pull off, though getting into metadata cleanup (such as in packaging) is something I could see being a larger project.

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It’s absolutely a consideration that has to be looked at, for certain.

It’s not as simple as just “change the name”.

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So, from the ‘needs’ perspective, what else is missing here?

I think there are probably lessons to learn from Twitter’s rebrand (as much as I dislike Twitter/X), as I still see news outlets reporting on “X (formerly Twitter)” or some variation. On the one hand, a reminder like that is always useful; on the other hand, it’s kinda annoying, and makes me wonder who doesn’t know about the name change.

I suspect that’s probably part of a marketing campaign, and we’d need something like that as well, ideally put together by someone who knows how to effectively market a name change.

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That’s another consideration that has to be taken into account, and something that needs to be answered, but it’s sort of a chicken and egg problem. The two items being:

A) Is there the possibility of a budget from SUSE S.A. for Marketing/Communications/Whatever, if there is a rebrand done?

(From some very preliminary conversations, it seems that the possibility exists, but the preliminary discussion brought up “What does this budgetary number look like?”)

B) Marketing and Communications around this, if it’s decided to rename/rebrand, is going to need resources/budget dedicated to it, and we need to formulate some sort of budget for it, before we can really go back to SUSE S.A. about this.

I’ve never done something like this, so any number I tossed out there, would be a completely uninformed number.

I think your example of Twitter/X is actually a pretty good one, in that their decision was just “We’re changing the name”

I do have some experience with this, through the renaming of the desktops based on MicroOS, which was done without a Major plan in place, and I still regularly have to fight with people that are hitting old posts around the internet, and rightly or wrongly, don’t pay any attention to the age of those posts, and then show up wanting support, for things that haven’t actually existed, for almost 18 months now.

And MicroOS/Aeon/Kalpa don’t have 20 years of those posts hanging out on the internet waiting for people find them.

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Maybe we can avoid the chicken and egg problem, by not crosslinking these two dependencies, but instead just having a dependency on “if we’re going to rebrand, we need to do x, y, z, […] - and that’s going to cost $D.”

Then, if we don’t get $D from somewhere (SUSE S.A., donations to the foundation, other sponsors, whomever), then we can’t do the rebranding. I think it’s as simple as that, really - if it’s going to cost us more than we can afford, we can’t do it.

That requires figuring out what the bare minimum is that we can do and have a good chance at success, so we know what the floor is for that expense.

It may be that we need some funding in order to bring in someone to consult and help us determine what’s needed, and that’s where we start. Or SUSE S.A. or another sponsor with someone on staff who has experience with rebranding can donate that person’s time to help us answer those questions, perhaps?

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SUSE S.A. wants to rebrand openSUSE to better fit its business strategy and clarify the difference between the community project and its enterprise products. As such, it makes sense for SUSE S.A. to help fund this rebranding effort, as expecting the community to handle it from a legal, financial, and logistical standpoint would be unfeasible. So, I share Jim’s linear perspective - either they can assist in making it happen (personnel and $), or it can’t happen successfully at all.

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It will take some effort and work but I think the rebranding can be a win towards the end of it for us. Just figuring out the right way to go about it will be the tough part.

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That is the purpose of this particular discussion topic - to figure that out.

Let’s get some ideas going. I’m not a marketing strategist, but it seems like having a clear story about the different elements (project, distros, other projects) would be a starting place, and then mapping “where we are today” to “where we want to be” would let us start exploring how to get there. We don’t have to have the “right” or “best” answers at this stage - let’s employ Cunningham’s Law and recognize that even “bad ideas” can lead to “good ideas”.

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Somewhat related, it seems that SUSE has been doing some rebranding of its own as well - maybe there are some ‘lessons learned’ that the project could leverage.

Granted that this is rebranding of product names rather than “SUSE” becoming something else, but there still might be things we can learn.

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SUSE has a history of renames and rebrandings, and if there is any lesson to learn from it is that it is incredibly difficult to perform (see e.g. how many people still refer to SUSE as SuSE for example, even though that has changed 15+ years ago).

A related learning we had in the openSUSE community is that non-standard capitalization style in a name is not helping. It has to be all upper case , all lower case or just start with an upper case.

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Those are good insights - especially around the capitalization. I’ve been a professional writer, and it feels wrong to start a sentence with ‘openSUSE’ having a lowercase ‘o’ at the start. I think ultimately, though, correcting people on usage isn’t something that makes people feel welcome.

There’s a UX design principle that I was introduced to years ago called “accessible by design” (the context was in complying with WCAG requirements); I think there’s a similar principle that should be used when it comes to branding and making the usage of a brand’s elements simple.

I also certainly support the idea that if someone uses it incorrectly in casual conversation, it’s not really important to correct the usage. If it’s used improperly in third party documentation (for example), that’s where it needs to be fixed. But even better would be for it to be designed to be easy to use correctly so that it does get used correctly in casual and formal usage.

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I think we should do what we can with keeping the same type of branding where we can. Green colors, a chameleon as a primary mascot, and all that. I think our users want minimal change, maybe just the name if we can get away with that. I think the name is really the major thing that people are talking about and are most curious about.
I know the whole Geeko Foundation has been around and is playing some sort of part in all of this.

I guess that really comes down to the question, how should we go about picking a new name? A poll/survey or public hall? Personally, I think OpenGeeko sounds perfectly fine as a name to change branding to and still keep some of that original identity the community was built around.

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Good comments, but really what the focus here is not what the logos are, name is, or anything at that level. It’s more about understanding how we get from the current state to the future state. What considerations need to be included in a rebranding exercise, and what costs the project will be needing assistance with.

The name is an “easy” discussion - and there are things about it like trademark validation (making sure any proposed name doesn’t step on an existing trademark). But it’s things like “we need to make sure the selected name is free of intellectual property constraints” are the sorts of things we need to enumerate.

Everyone has ideas about what the name should be - and that’ll come in due course. :slight_smile:

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I’m not confident that a discussion here can tangibly achieve that. Doesn’t the openSUSE Foundation (Geeko Foundation) already have the effective legal stewardship of the openSUSE Project? Or is that not the case? In any case, surely their representation in this discussion is key for any progression?

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I don’t know that they have that as of yet. Either way, though, identifying the steps needed will help determine what costs, if any, there are, and then we can work out if what the foundation has is sufficient or if we need someone else (like SUSE SA) to help with it.

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Are you hoping to get the actual provisional costing as part of this “high level” discussion? Wouldn’t that need to be taken to brand consultants for meaningful numbers?

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Well, to get more precise figures, sure. But we have expertise in the community (I would assume) with marketing, so we could get some ballpark figures that would serve as a starting point.

Similarly, we can identify what needs to change, which is useful for an overall rebranding discussion. It isn’t as simple as “let’s just pick a new name and roll with it”. :slight_smile:

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To be honest this discussion feels like some kind of “break out room” discussion, missing the board and foundation representatives needed to make it a serious discussion, that can be had with a more complete audience. Wouldn’t they undertake such a process?

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Members of the board were involved in crafting the original topic here (this is the case for all three, which is why they’re owned by the ‘system’ - there wasn’t a single author).

The board is asking for community input.