[kde-promo] Plasma Next Naming

[Martin Klapetek]

I would just like to respond to one point (and related) as the rest was
pretty covered by Ivan.

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

>  > Then again - you have Ubuntu (changing every 6 months), OS X and I
> don’t
>

>
> > know what else....and using an animal (weird ones in Ubuntu's case) works
>
> > good for all their purposes (including business)?
>
>
>
> Running a $20 million loss on 60 million in revenue after 10 years (none
> of which has been profitable) is not a business success. That may not be
> Canonical’s goal, though, so I don’t personally judge them by that.
>

Yes, they are at loss. And yet they are still one of the most popular Linux
distros. Same goes for OS X which uses both version AND a codename (like
11.1 Mountain Lion -- completely made up, I don't follow their versions).
So just pointing to a recent bad news for Canonical does not actually make
the point irrelevant - they are still among the top even with their crazy
saucy names. And OS X is still very liked I hear, despite their
shortcomings in many ways.

The reason I liked “elegance” and “progressive technology you can rely on”
> as themes to reach for is that they are timeless and universal without much
> specific definition (they are plastic terms). It also don’t have a personal
> stamp on them: elegance can be contextualized to the team of the day and to
> any number of audiences. Elegance is a timeless concept.
>

It's nice to hear and all, but so far the marine theme is just one
proposal. I mean, you keep iterating other concepts, but please, try
extending them a bit to a real form (and I mean it, maybe we'll get at
something better) and not just stating them for the sake of it.


> > Or is there any evidence it's actually hurting them in some way?
>
>
>
> I think someone else in the thread already noted that the animal naming +
> the dates was confusing within their community communication. I don’t have
> personal experience with that, so can’t say.
>
>
>
> Personally, I would not be looking to a chronically unprofitable company
> who publicly promoted a losing revision control system (bzr rather than
> git), advocated an impossible development cycle which they no longer even
> follow for their own devel (which for better or worse KDE adopted, though
> that seems to be coming to an end), failed very publicly at crowdfunding a
> device, is busy publicly forking the Linux desktop space to much jeering,
> has bet their desktop future by basically mimicking what Plasma started 6
> years ago (from choice in UI toolkit to ‘big picture’ device goals) and is
> generally seen as one of the more divisive entities in Free software for
> the last couple of years as a role model for public positioning.
>

Sure, they may be unprofitable, but again - it's one of the most popular
distros out there, no matter how much personally we hate it (and I have
some grieves against Canonical too) and laugh at them, that's actually even
inappropriate. The fact still remains - Ubuntu releases are named after
animals and they are still successful in terms of being very popular
(whatever their revenue is). It's as simple as that.

Cheers
-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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