Re: Use of the word GNOME

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 07:31 +1000, Michael Lamothe wrote:

> Down to business, I've written a nice little DVB client using
> libgnome.  Now, I'm not very creative when it comes to names so I
> called it 'GNOME TV'. If/when I ever distribute the application (GPL'd
> of course) am I allowed to use the word "GNOME" in its title, or is it
> trademarked.  Is it a bad idea, in general, to use GNOME in the
> title. 

I don't know about the trademark issue, but in general it's not usually
a great idea to call your app "GNOME Foo" because:

- Your app will probably run quite happily on KDE and other desktop
environments too, so the fact that it has anything to do with GNOME is
mostly irrelevant to your users.

- If everybody called their GNOME apps "GNOME Foo", then they'd all be
listed under "G" on the Applications menu, which makes them harder to
find.  (See also
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-integration.html#menu-item-names)

What you choose to call the binary is a separate issue; we do still have
a lot of apps called $EPREFIX/bin/gnome-foo, and I'm not sure if we
actually have any guidelines about that. (I'd like to think that we do,
though.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems