Linux Becomes Female 4595

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005 10:04:15 +0100, Roy Schestowitz

That's not the issue. Revenue doesn't equal quality, with films it matters, with OSS it doesn't. Producing a high quality film that plants at the box office may put you out of business, producing high quality opensource software that doesn't sell (whatever that is in this context), means nothing apart from respect in the community.

Here are a couple of examples of (brand-)names - which may sound feminine in the Firefox or Thunderbird sense - companies chose and received funding. So some suits must have thought their names were in fact OK:

Mercedes: It's a female name and quite a lot of serious people drive cars with this name (according to BBC's Top Gear, 98% of all governments have some)

Apple: These people must have been crazy to choose a name like that. Will never be successful...

Honeywell: Sweet isn't it...

Novellus, Cisco, Zeneca, Nestle... How are these names any more "professional" than Firefox or Thunderbird?

Since when are programs like grip or biff supposed to be professional or rather to be used in a corporate environment for "professional" use? KDE is in fact a really bad example (did you notice that most KDE applications are identified by their function not by their name in KDE menus and tool tips: Personal Files, Web Browser etc.), especially considering that most (office worker type, non-IT) people don't even know the names of the programs they are using. They use a browser, a word processor or a mail client. I have seen too many people not recognizing that they are using Firefox, to still believe that names matter. They will recognize the missing feature that they loved so much in another software. Only then will they look for some names.

-- Andreas