Re: Distribution branding of GNOME

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 08:52 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> > Of course, we have no way to make it mandatory, but GNOME as a brand has
> > suffered greatly by the whitewashing practiced by distributions, most
> > notably the "Java Desktop Environment" (I mean, honestly, what the hell is
> > that?), but Red Hat's desktop is also a major offender.  Perhaps if we
> > asked nicely.
> 
> What would we ask? "Please genericise your desktop so it is unrecognisable?"
> I don't think that would get us very far. Now, the "powered by" logos idea
> has come up numerous times, but thus far, no one's done it.

One of the things we discussed during the Summit last year is whether we
actually want to promote the Gnome brand:

http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fTargetMarkets_2fLinuxDistros

There are at least two strategies:

1. Be aggressive in promoting the brand.  This implies that the Board
get its act together and solve the trademark issue.  This would get us
to ask distros to keep foot logos, or generally say "Powered by Gnome"
in some conspicuous fashion.

2. Make Gnome so compelling by itself that no one would think of using
anything else, even if they re-brand it.  The suggestion in the wiki
page above is to make branding as easy as possible, hopefully with a
gnome-brand-o-matic program into which you can drag icons and images,
click a button, and out comes a tarball/package/schema file that will
brand GNOME as you specified.  This would be a killer feature for
regional distros:  unlike large distributors, these have few resouces to
re-invent the branding wheel themselves.

While it would be very pretty to see "Powered by [Gnome foot]" in every
boxed distribution (oh god, does anyone sell boxed software anymore?),
or in login splash screens, do we really want to see

  [Powered by the Linux kernel]
  [Powered by GNU]
  [Powered by the X Window System]
  [Powered by Gnome]
  [Powered by Mozilla]
  [Powered by OpenOffice]
  [Powered by your mother's knickers]

everywhere?

In either of the cases above, we have to make Gnome so good, so
compelling, that people wouldn't want to use anything else.  In the
first case they would say, "not powered by Gnome?  I'm not using it,
then".  In the second case they would say, "doesn't feel like Gnome?
I'm not using it, then".  We are not at that point yet.

  Federico