Re: About Panels - aka lynching time

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 18:32, Rob Adams wrote:
> Does Sun at least retain the credits?  It's kind of unfortunate that Sun
> completely rebrands everything and completely wipes out all GNOME brands
> and logos.  It's as though Sun is trying to claim credit for all the
> work that went into GNOME.

We probably should have some guidelines for what's considered "polite"
vs. "not polite" - my view is that tastefully giving credit in an
appropriate place is mandatory, but trying to pervasively introduce
names/logos is misguided (when done by either GNOME or a company).

Look at how Apple does branding; the Apple logos are subtle and not all
over the place. Instead, there's a "look" and a sensibility that
pervades all the products. I believe GNOME is similarly having a lot of
success with this approach. 
Here is an interesting writeup:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/048GoodGrips.html

Note that we de-branded GNOME extensively for 2.0, and it was IMHO a
usability boost. For Red Hat Linux 8.0 we also pushed a similar
de-Red-Hat-izing of our stuff. So e.g. in GNOME "GNOME Terminal" in
titlebar -> "Terminal", and for redhat-config-xfree86 traditionally it
would be "Red Hat Magic X Configuration Tool Wizard Thing" and now it is
"Display settings"

The Times Square approach makes menus, titlebars etc. suck a lot (for
window titles, consider the limited size of window list buttons e.g.
"GNOME Te" as a button). For menus, it almost doubles the number of
characters in some of them.

Also, keep in mind the old "GNU/Linux" joke about
"GNU/XFree86/BSD/Perl/Apache/Python/GNOME/KDE/Linux" - you see the
problem. If you think I'm kidding, see this thing I just found on
Google:
http://lists.kde.com/pipermail/dot-stories/2002q1/000226.html

Havoc