Just when I thought that openSUSE was free from stupid corporate decisions, their main sponsor, SUSE S.A., came with a strange request: openSUSE should “stop using the SUSE brand”! WTF is that shit?! (H/T to Linuxiac.)

1. Lately, animosity arose around an “Open Letter to the openSUSE Board, Project and Community (Final)”!

From the mailing list:

SUSE is an organisation that enables openSUSE to do far more than SUSE needs openSUSE to do.
SUSE actively provides resources to openSUSE above and beyond what SUSE clearly needs to improve their business.

This status quo is built upon good will.
Good will isn’t fostered by either party throwing around threats or making firm demands.

The fact is, SUSE have formally, calmly, and quite nicely, asked openSUSE to stop using the SUSE brand.

If we as a community fail to work productively with that request, then we will be choosing to decrease the good will between SUSE and openSUSE.

I would expect that choice would not lead to SUSE escalating matters to get their own way, I don’t see that as the “SUSE way” of doing things.
What I would imagine is an outcome that’s would actually far worse – Apathy and a tendency to put priorities elsewhere.

A huge amount of what openSUSE excels at is facilitated by SUSE either giving openSUSE more than SUSE would otherwise need, or SUSE turning a blind eye and supporting it’s employees when they give extra
contributions to openSUSE during work time than the business would otherwise need.

Any decrease in good will between SUSE and openSUSE puts those sort of contributions at risk.

Also from their ML:

• Our current governance is not working. With the things we’re facing and the
  current model / Board rules, there is no good way the Board could drive the
  resulting changes coming up. Bi-weekly meetings will definitely not be enough.
  Furthermore, the Board has not shown any real proactive leadership in some situations
  where it should have. In the end, the reason I stepped down from it.
• Whether we like it or not, we have to rebrand the Project. We can start
  working on it now and be proactive, or later be forced by f.e. some new owner
  of SUSE (mind, SUSE has expressed their concern about such a thing happening
  and clearly stated that they do not want to get rid of the Project). To
  drive this we need something else than the Board as it is now. But keeping
  things as they are simply is an unrealistic option.
• We need more contributors. It is a simple fact that we have been losing those, So, we
  have to question ourselves not only on how we’re getting more people in, but also on how
  we keep them in. From what I’ve seen too many of them start enthusiastically and get burnt
  out because lack of onboarding / mentoring. That said, I’ve also seen exceptions to that.

What can we do? …

• The choice of a new name for the Project would best be a limited choice of ~3 names,
  that that team would have researched/checked, this to avoid having an endless list of non-
  workable options.
• The rebranding of the distros as f.e. “openSUSE Tumbleweed” to “Tumbleweed” is already
  an ongoing thing. I don’t see any reason to have a discussion about that again.
• A vote on the Project logo has already been done, and was won by our LCP, no need to do
  that again. The people maintaining the distros have accepted LCP’s logos as their distro
  logo, so using the same design for the Project makes sense since it gives a nice
  consistency.

It seems that their organization doesn’t quite work. This came as a surprise to me, but maybe it shouldn’t.

The problem is that, when they organized this Logo contest back in December, they didn’t mention any pressure from SUSE to have them change their visual identity. Was this a deliberate lie? What they said was this:

Our logo contest has provided us with a wealth of creative input and diverse perspectives that lay a strong foundation for deliberations on the future direction for the project.

What?! What has a logo to do with the direction of a project? Should Debian change the logo, would the distro become something else?! Any better, or any worse? More agile, or more stagnant?

I’m afraid that this guy, who is on openSUSE’s Board, has worked too many years in marketing and sales (he even developed “corporate communication tools”), so he just can’t explain actual ideas with straight words. This is corporate BS.

2. As for the current “incident” (?!), it’s being discussed on Reddit:

This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard, the community version of SUSE linux has been called openSUSE for over 18 years and it was never a problem, everyone working in the IT sector knows the difference of SLES vs openSUSE.

I happen to agree. But let’s say they do that. How would the public react? Someone on Reddit:

I guess they can do that. But in future, if I know what OpenSOOS is and need a server, SUSE won’t even come to mind any more. I’ll probably just forget they exist amongst RHEL and Ubuntu.

That is, the OpenSUSE project is the only thing to remind me that SUSE is even a choice.

Also:

Sorry, WHAT?

OpenSUSE is for many people the way they find out that SUSE exists. Do they really want to do that to themselves? Just shoot themselves in the foot with a darn CANNON?

There are nuances to be considered (I corrected the capitalization, for clarity):

I’m not sure it matters. If openSUSE was rebranded Tumbleweed or something, people would still find it and I doubt it would affect the rate that companies choose SLE. If the system admin’s personal distro is Tumbleweed he probably knows about SLE regardless of the name.

Red Hat might want to make sure people understand Fedora and RHEL are very different. SUSE might want to do the same. Tumbleweed has fairly little to do with SLE after all.

And yet…

Fedora is named after RedHat’s… Fedora, that is, the logo. It’s actually pretty interesting how Fedora has changed over time, and I would argue that RedHat has hurt themselves by further distancing the brands.

But also, RedHat named Fedora back before it was in existence. SuSE named openSuSE. Now, going back to tell them, yeah, we named you, but change. It doesn’t seem like a great move from a branding perspective.

3. I discovered that the efforts for changing openSUSE’s name are far older than that. Here’s a page that has been “last edited on 4 December 2019, at 18:20”: openSUSE:Project name change vote.

The Election Committee announced that the vote will be held from 10 Oct to 7 Nov 2019.

The results:

Do we change the project name?
Yes 42
No 225

But, I guess, SUSE wasn’t happy with that. How come they waited 5 more years before bringing up the subject one more time?

Back in 2019, here’s the reason of the failed vote:

I’ve had a chat with our friends at SUSE Legal about this topic, especially the possibility of the Foundation owning / controlling the trademark.

While SUSE does not wish to formally rule anything out at this time, their opinion is that, if the openSUSE Project was to formally request that SUSE transfers ownership of the openSUSE trademarks to the Foundation, then SUSE would almost certainly have to decline that request.

This is because it is highly unlikely any trademark law anywhere would be compatible with the idea of a legally separate organisation owning a trademark that contains another organisations trademark.

One possibility open for consideration is the idea of licensing the openSUSE Marks to the Foundation.

Such a thing will need to happen even if the Foundation forms under a different name but if we were to wish to continue using the openSUSE name in our distributions.

It is possible that such a license could be exclusive and maybe non-revokable.

But any such license will likely have to come with conditions, which could restrict Foundation from some activities which could be seen to be competition with SUSE’s business of providing support for software.

While there is further investigation required, it is not expected that any such restriction would impact openSUSE’s current activities which include 3rd parties redistributing openSUSE in a commercial setting (Box sets, pre-installed on hardware, hosting).

And it should go without saying, but for absolute clarity, there isn’t a desire from SUSE to overly restrict the openSUSE community from being able to do what it wants.

Whatever the community decides to request in regards to the Foundation, Trademarks, etc, there will be an extensive effort to find the most reasonable accommodating solution that works well for all involved.

It’s complicated.

4. Renaming the project and its distros isn’t an easy task IMO. To me, openSUSE’s OS offering is quite rich: Leap (stable), Tumbleweed (pure rolling), Slowroll (slower roling), which can all be used in whatever way you want (server, desktop), plus modern contraptions and combinations of concepts: MicroOS (Micro Service OS), Aeon (MicroOS GNOME Desktop), Kalpa (MicroOS KDE Desktop), Argon (Leap with the latest KDE, à la KDE neon), Krypton (Tumbleweed with the latest KDE), and Leap Micro (Leap as MicroOS).

Oh, wait. Not everyone agrees that openSUSE has so many distros:

In a very practical sense, these are all openSUSE Linux, just different variants or snapshots of it. I’ve personally felt for a long time that we’ve done ourselves a disservice by calling them “distributions” as if they’re completely separate things. Sure, maybe openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap could be considered as such. But Krypton, MicroOS, Aeon, and Kalpa? They are all variants of openSUSE Tumbleweed, not wholly separate things in their own right. And Leap itself has Argon and Leap Micro as variants.

Having an overarching banner that is clearly communicated in our deliverables and in our community benefits us when communicating and advocating.

Oh, well. Whatever. But how are they going to agree on the new names? Pointless debate on Reddit:

Don’t do weird new names nobody knows; just drop the opensuse part if you have to and use what people call them: tumbleweed, leap, aeon, etc.

To throw away a well known brand is something not to be done lightly, and to replace it with something is really difficult to do right. I highly doubt something like geekos falls in the right category unless you want to throw away all brand recognition you have.

And:

I agree.

I think dropping the openSUSE brand is the easiest option and going forward with the established names for each separate offering.

Buuut…

How will people know they are related under one “umbrella” and not completely separate distributions altogether?

The fucking fuck, they’re stoopid, those software developers and architects and whatnot:

Do people really need to know that they are? The three have quite different target audiences.

Too bad the names aren’t all lizard themed, it could be called the “lizard family”.

For me it would catch my eye if I read that openSUSE had a new version. For example when I read about slowroll I thought “well, if openSUSE is doing it, it’s worth checking out”. If it had been just another name like the thousands of distros out there I probably would just have not noticed or cared. There is something about a brand name you trust.

I also would have liked it if they were all named after lizards, then it would have a theme working as an umbrella name, but without the umbrella name. But I guess it would be difficult now to rename Tumbleweed as “Bearded Dragon OS” or something.

I disagree with the following one (and who or what is “a Bernhard”?!):

But Slowroll is pretty much “just Bernhard”, not openSUSE.

Leap is pretty much “just SUSE”, not openSUSE.

And Aeon is pretty much “just the Aeon community”, not openSUSE.

Isn’t the fact you were duped into investigating something that “openSUSE” wasn’t doing because the name was misused precisely a good reason to stop misusing the name?

Reptiles, reptiles, reptiles!

I like that idea! Chameleon for tumbleweed because it can change quickly. Iguana for Leap because it is slow and steady. and Basilisk for Aeon because it is a cool name and Aeon is a cool implementation. (I would have used gecko for one of the names, but that is already taken.)

So we would have openSUSE Chameleon, openSUSE Iquana and openSUSE Basilisk. Those names, alone, would generate a lot of interest.

Except there would be no openSUSE, because they aren’t allowed to use the name anymore.

Some people want to get involved:

GeekOS feels like an early 2000s name/brand. Considering that many people noted yesterday that openSUSE has a variety of products for different user bases, why not change openSUSE to “Geeko Project” and drop “openSUSE” from each product name? For example, we could have Tumbleweed, Aeon, etc., as distinct products under the Geeko Project umbrella. The objective would be to promote the use of Linux everywhere, keeping a modern and professional brand name without any trademark issue.

All OpenSuse variants are derived from Tumbleweed, this should be the name of the distribution, with the addition of the variable you are using. Tumbleweed, Tumbleweed Aeon, Tumbleweed Slowroll,… That’s how it is in Fedora.

But then Leap is pretty distant from Tumbleweed, so a “Tumbleweed Leap” seems inappropriate.

Leap is SLE, so it should be called openSUSE, without further qualifiers.

Or whatever animal will openSUSE metamorphose into.

Note that those who plead for this change really want to make it happen: We’re all grown up: openSUSE is not SUSE. Oh, sort of weaning. Here’s a selection of slides from that speech:

This is part BS, part nightmare. I suppose this is the price you have to pay if you grow up in the shadow of a commercial entity that has a stupid corporate mindset. Maybe we, the public, should only trust the independent distros. But the one and only truly independent mainstream distro is Debian, which has disappointed me in the last ~5 years. Besides, there was that jocular saying about Debian, but I don’t remember the exact wording. It went along this line: “Debian has three branches: antiquated, stale, and broken.” That’s to say: stable, testing, and sid. Meh.

5. With nine distinct distros (or spins and variants), the openSUSE project needs to be highly functional, otherwise it will flop soon. Then, SUSE’s will to distance themselves from openSUSE will look like a wise idea.

Frankly, there is chaos, havoc, and decay everywhere in Linux. It’s not just that 500 distros have died in the last 20 years. The increased complexity of everything made it difficult to maintain an independent distro with limited manpower. Let’s face it, the enthusiasm for “let’s make a Linux distro” has faded severely, and despite the abomination that’s Win11, it won’t be resurrected.

But if the Debian project is a stagnant puddle, this “only” affects Ubuntu and its derivatives. Should Fedora fail to build EPEL, then RHEL, Alma Linux, and Rocky Linux, deprived of essential software and only having GNOME for a desktop environment, will remain confined to servers. Oh, they would also be used by those mentally retarded zoomers who really can use GNOME without cursing every five seconds and without feeling they have zero productivity. One should be born into macOS to like GNOME, and even then. Should openSUSE, under a different name, become irrelevant, this might be the nail in the coffin for “Linux on the desktop”!

And I’m not sure that FreeBSD could become what Linux couldn’t. You know, the best Windows replacement.

6. Maybe the openSUSE Board will manage to successfully rebrand everything, and to get more contributors instead of losing them.

But are they getting along during this crucial operation? It doesn’t look this way to me:

Whether we like it or not, we have to rebrand the Project.

Who says that?

So far, the rebranding has been called a “proposal”, and questions what exactly that means are either unanwered, or got answers as clear as mud. The only thing that was made slightly more clear (clear as muddy water?) was that SUSE won’t force us.

So please stop claiming that we have to.

IMHO the rebranding is a terribly bad idea which will cause lots of problems and damage. Therefore we should decline that proposal and keep openSUSE as our name.

Oops. Also:

Sources I will and cannot reveal told me we don’t have to.

A little bird (son petit doigt) told him. The Board fights back:

I’m also not sure who your source is, but the information they have given you does not reflect the information that was last given to the board from SUSE. Who to make it clear are not forcing us to rebrand the project.

My personal opinion is that while SUSE is willing to work with us on rebranding and the majority of the community seems onboard with it given there are good reasons and we have help to mitigate the negatives now is probably the right time because the opinion of SUSE may very well change sometime in the future.

There is an identity crisis too: who’s what, after all?

Both Andy and Robert were directly representing SUSE, the largest collection of contributors to openSUSE, the largest financial contributor to openSUSE, the administrator of our build service, the
facilitator of all our infrastructure, our employer, and more.

I know you’re supportive of their request and are doing what you can to help things along, but I really felt the need to call out how uncomfortable your choice of language made me here.

Everyone involved in this situation is an openSUSE contributor. There is no us (openSUSE) vs them (SUSE).

There’s just ‘us’, and correcting the consequences of mistakes made 20 years ago when deciding what moniker to use for that collective ‘us’ in this Project.

This is surreal. OpenSUSE is just another arm of SUSE. What keeps SUSE from pulling the plug on the openSUSE project?!

The opposition to the proposed changes remains strong:

Again, investigating our options now is better than wait-and-see, wouldn’t you agree?

No, because the option we “should” investigate means lots of work and lots of foreseeable problems, with the best-possible (but unlikely) result of “not much damage done”, and some worst-case results I don’t even want to imagine (“Who on earth is that $newname distro? Never heard of them!”)

To make things worse, all that is based on statements that are as clear as mud, and feel like FUD spread by a small number of people.

OTOH, wait and see – and accepting the risk that we might have to act in 5, 10 or 100 years – avoids all the foreseeable and very real issues a rebrand will cause. And who knows, maybe a future owner of SUSE is a big fan of openSUSE and fulfils all our dreams. I know nobody mentioned this option before, but it’s as likely or unlikely as the worst-case option.

If you look around in the news, companies very rarely change their name, because they know that it’s extremely hard and can cause lots of damage. The few rebrands I’ve seen so far were because these companies had completely f***ed up before, and hoped that people wouldn’t recognize them under their new name, and wouldn’t remember all the evil things they did before.

I don’t think that openSUSE belongs to that category.

To summarize it in a completely different way:

No, I will not move to a tent and call a demolition company to pull down my house, just because every day some houses in germany burn down. Instead, I will wait and see, accept the (small) risk and stay in the house. And no, I don’t even consider a camping trailer to be a sane alternative. (Did I mention that a storm just blew away a tent?)

A last quote I’ll give here:

And who knows, maybe a future owner of SUSE is a big fan of openSUSE and fulfils all our dreams. I know nobody mentioned this option before, but it’s as likely or unlikely as the worst-case option.

Layoffs everywhere, RHEL combating the clones by closing the sources behind the paywall etc. Wouldn’t have too high hopes…

This may sound crazy so bear with me, but what if we just respect the request of those who essentially keeps this project alive? […]

I’m aware of all the SUSE contributions, and I did SUSE and/or individual SUSE people more than one favor (often, but not always, as part of an openSUSE contribution). I’m also sure that I’m not the only one who can say that – actually many openSUSE contributors can probably tell similar stories.

Nevertheless, if someone from SUSE would ask me to shoot myself in the foot, and tells me that this is just a request, but I don’t have to do it – well, you can probably guess that I prefer not to shoot 😉

The rebranding idea asks the whole openSUSE community to shoot in its foot, using a very big gun. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I can only decline that request with “bad idea, no thanks”.

What a snafu. A request that’s not a request. What came then from SUSE, a kind suggestion? What for?!

7. To me, openSUSE’s governance is a mess. And the fact that they’re losing contributors is the best proof of that. Maybe they should change their name in Banana Republic OS. Oh, they can’t, unless they make an arrangement with GAP, which owns the homonymous brand.

Come to think of it, there’s a unique way openSUSE provides an unparalleled service to the Linux community, and this is their Open Build Service (OBS). Everyone can use this infrastructure to build and offer packages for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other distributions! Canonical’s Launchpad is Ubuntu-centric (Debian doesn’t support PPAs), and Fedora’s Koji only builds RPMs for Fedora and EL. Nothing compares to the versatility of OBS, which offers proper repositories, not PPAs and COPRs!

So openSUSE is important to the Linux community, even to those who are not using any of their distros! It would be devastating if the trademark issues with SUSE and the subsequent antagonisms led to the collapse of openSUSE’s projects. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen.

OpenSUSE is also, despite its more limited user base compared to Fedora’s, the only one of the two that has a stable distro offering. Despite Fedora claiming to be a point-release distro, this is a lie: during the lifetime of a release, the kernel is constantly upgraded, and most GUI packages too (e.g. KDE), which makes it 80% rolling-release. What a bunch of idiots. To get something enterprise-stable, one has to choose between AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux (because Red Hat killed CentOS), or to go the openSUSE Leap way. (Leap 15.5 had incredibly obsolete packages compared to EL 9.2/9.3, with which it was contemporary, but Leap 15.6 is way more advanced in the kernel and GUI software compared to EL 9.4, which now looks stupidly backward, especially kernel-wise.)

I’ll close with a quote from Richard Brown of openSUSE, the one who wrote that “SUSE have formally, calmly, and quite nicely, asked openSUSE to stop using the SUSE brand”:

In the openSUSE context, popularity is often a source of far more bugs, issues, developer stress and burnout than brings actual developers.

When it DOES bring new developers, they typically do new stuff that wasn’t already being done, so our existing maintainers still don’t get any relief from the burdens of extra popularity.

So, in that pure community context, popularity is a threat, not a benefit. A self sustaining community needs just enough popularity to keep enough developers interested to do the core work of the project – anything more is extra and potentially risky.

And then when you consider these two contexts together, openSUSE AND SUSE.

SUSE uses openSUSE as an incubator for new tech AND as a check and balance on its own development – SUSE devs have to send everything to Factory/Tumbleweed so they don’t need to worry about rebasing their work years later when new SUSE products pull from Tumbleweed.

But Tumbleweed is like 3x larger than SLE. 66% of what openSUSE does is irrelevant and should openSUSE become more popular that percentage would most likely grow.

Sure… it’s cool when the winds of business needs change and the next big thing has already been sitting in Tumbleweed for years. This is how SUSE got aarch64 working in SLE so fast. But those are still a minority of cases and not justification for investing in improving openSUSEs popularity.

From a development point of view, Leap is mostly irrelevant as the issues there are amplified – the codebase is equally way larger than SLE and any extra features in there are unlikely to ever see light of day in SLE, as it’s more likely to come from when SLE adopts new tech from Tumbleweed

So… what benefit is popularity really?

Neither openSUSE nor SUSE are aiming to make consumer products that will take over the world.

Given the goals, skills, expertise and ability of both organisations, considering their natures both separately and interlinked, we have a self sustaining loop that sees our popularity ebb and flow at the whims of social media.

And I think that’s just fine.

On the contrary, I find it catastrophic! I mean, depressing. Would popularity be a threat to Debian? Absolutely not, as it has no upstream to worry about. The same could be said about FreeBSD, for instance. To say that Leap is irrelevant because it’s irrelevant for SLE means to nullify yourself and only think of your masters. This is sick. If popularity is such a PITA, why the fuck do you have so many offerings with names that are so difficult to associate with what they represent? Focus on Tumbleweed and MicroOS, and call it a day!