add some clarity to my insane proposal

for the record, when i suggested providing a name to help differentiate between "kde apps" and "apps that the kde project ships" i wasn't seriously suggesting getting rid of the term "kde" or changing the project's name either. i mean, even if we wanted to, the sheer weight of trademark efforts, domain names, references and current name recognition rule it out immediately. nor do i think we should rename our libraries as that would mean changing things both for 3rd party developers (who could no long say, "i'm writing a kde app") but also for all our library code that says "KDE" in it.

rather, i was hoping people would think of the challenge of defining what a kde app is, where "kde app" is a superset of "app that the kde project ships". i was even thinking someone might profer that "apps written with kde libs aren't necessarily 'kde apps'"

to be clear: i think that applying a uniform brand to the set of apps that we ship might make sense. consider, for a moment, that we decided to call the set of applications we ship with kde4 "grolabonk". then we could say that app Foo was a grolabonk app. grolabonk itself would be a term we'd reserve for "kde apps that the kde project ships".

this actually isn't very revolutionary of a concept if we consider that koffice already does this. kword is a kde application shipped by the koffice project. it is a "koffice" app. it's also a "kde app". the ownership and grouping is fairly obvious.

as to what we'd name it exactly ... well, that's probably better left to a marketing wonk somewhere. we developers (and end users for that matter ;) tend to suck at coming up with names. for those of us who are members of the kde project, it is less important what the actual name is (as long as we don't hate it, of course =) than it is that we're ok with having such a name (assuming it's a good one).

this is sort of like how i don't try and create icons but let people with artistic talent make them. i do often start out with a "i need an icon that communicates $CONCEPT", but the actual implementation is an artist's job. and so it should be similar with a name IMHO.

of cousre we still get to name the betas ;) (btw, i think "turing", "dijkstra", "nash" and other deceased giants in the field of information science would make a good theme.) and yeah, we need the numbers (e.g. kde x.y.z) for packagers and geeks alike.

anyways.. IMHO a name should:

• sound good
• easily support effective marketing messages for each of our target audiences
• provide a brand that we can apply to the apps that ship with a kde.org release

i also realize that i'm thinking about this a long time in advance of even needing such things. but to be fair to those who would be doing the art and marketing, we need to having something at least 6 months in advance of release. and knowing how involved the process of getting consensus can be within a project the size and nature of kde, i figured now was a good time to start that process. =)