kubuntu-council team mailing list archive

[Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday, May 16, 2014 17:49:17 Rohan Garg wrote:
> Hey everyone
> So after a brief discussion with Riddell and Harald, there seems to be
> enough precedent to bring this up again.
> 
> Basically, this is a RFC to rebrand our release of Kubuntu with Plasma
> Workspaces 2 and Frameworks 5 ( as and when that happens ). So instead
> of calling it Kubuntu or Kubuntu Next , we call it Awesome OS ( or
> whatever name we can decide upon ). The reason why we should do this
> are twofold :
> 
> a) Kubuntu contributes more heavily to the Ubuntu brand than we get back
> b) Whenever Ubuntu gets bad press, so do we, just because we have the
> 'ubuntu' substring in our brand
> 
> So, for our Kubuntu + KF 5 + PW 2 ISO I propose we move away from the
> Kubuntu brand and choose a new name. Once we have traction with that
> brand, we discontinue with the Kubuntu + KDE 4 ISO / Brand and switch
> over to "Awesome OS" as being a flavour of Ubuntu.

Last time we discussed renaming, it was clear a name change would get us 
kicked out of the archive and we'd have to be a derivative, not an Ubuntu 
flavor.  I'm not aware of any reason to think that's changed and looking at the 
Mint situation re licensing something we'd really like to avoid.

Even if that weren't an issue, I'm against rebranding.  It doesn't matter what 
we call it, as long as we're part of the Ubuntu project, we'll get some of 
whatever weirdness Canonical does to the Ubuntu desktop stuck on us.

The brand is well established and unlike 4 or 5 years ago, seems to be a 
pretty good one.  Rebranding seems to me like a great was to vanish into 
irrelevance.

Scott K