Repositioning the KDE brand

[Alejandro Exojo]

Hi. Sorry for jumping here a little late or if I'm adding noise, but I can't 
resist saying this because it's been in my head for months.

El Martes, 23 de Junio de 2009, Cornelius Schumacher escribió:
> The misconception that KDE software only runs on a KDE desktop stands as a
> symbol for the reasons why we need to adapt our messaging to this changed
> meaning of "KDE". The marketing and promo groups have completed a proposal
> how to achieve that. One key element of this proposal is to retire the term
> "K Desktop Environment", and just use "KDE". See the attached document for
> details.

I could not agree more with the initiative and with the suggestions made. I 
just want to add some small comments.

In January, there was this thread in the users mailinglist:

http://lists.kde.org/?t=115254767800001&r=1&w=2

A summary of the thread is something that probably all of you have seen once 
in a while: somebody asking which is "the KDE application" for some purpose, 
and then some confusion about if one application is more "official" than 
other because it's in a module (e.g. kdemultimedia), while other is in 
extragear, and the third in another repository outside of kde.org.

There were two messages which I think that clarified and summarized well the 
situation, and which say something similar to the proposal:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=123143661109959&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=123128532419211&w=2

I took note of this thread because I thought that it was something kind of 
important (and I wanted to send a mail to discuss it back then, but I thought 
that nobody will care at all). I see confusions like this almost once a month 
if I count all lists/webs that I read, and I thought that it was worth to 
create a nomenclature that could help in making all members of the community 
to communicate with less misunderstandings.

My idea back then was to use the following:

* KDE Powered/Based. Apps that use kdelibs, etc. (e.g. kdenlive or kaffeine 
will fit here, but also apps in extragear or in the modules released together 
like kdemultimedia or kdegraphics).

* KDE Hosted. Software that is hosted at kde.org (applications or other 
software, but of course users will care just about the first). This could 
apply to software not exclusively related to KDE, like taglib.

* KDE Suite/Distribution/Set/Bundle/Package... A group of software released at 
the same time. I like more "suite" because it avoids the confusion with Linux 
distributions, and sounds familiar to those used with terms like "office 
suite" or "mozilla suite", etc.

The rest is more or less how is expressed in the proposal.


And one last bit: not only the KDE-related naming is complex for users. If you 
look at TechBase right now [*], there is a link which says "developing with 
KDE". Without following the link and reading the page, who would be sure if 
the linked page is about using KDE software for development, or developing 
that software itself, or creating a KDE application? So yes, a brand name for 
Qt+kdelibs+others will be helpful.

Greetings.


[*] Techbase frontpage at the time of writing this:
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Welcome_to_KDE_TechBase&oldid=13658
-- 
Alex (a.k.a. suy) | GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ | http://disperso.net