Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
We’re bringing back “Edsel.”

We’re bringing back “Edsel.”

From the original list of 60+ candidate names for the Fedora 10 release, we’ve sent 21 to Red Hat’s legal department, to check and see if any of them run a serious risk of trademark infringement, collision with other software products, and so forth. Thus far we’ve only come up with four names that pass muster. This tells me two things:

  • The list we send to the legal department needs to be vetted more carefully against existing names. Even simple Google searches suffice, first using just the name, and then with added terms like “software,” “download,” “IT,” and “computer,” to see if there are existing uses that clearly and obviously make the name a bad choice. Josh Boyer is helping me go through the remaining 40 or so names for this purpose.
  • The community needs to come up with more offbeat names. ? And any contributor that suggests a name in the future might be asked to do a tiny amount of due diligence to see if the name collides. My own suggestion, for example, didn’t pass because of a collision. Mea culpa!

“Red Hat Linux 10,” anyone?

7 Comments

  1. Michael DeHaan

    I believe we need to start using crazier names, yes.

    Perhaps the name linking tradition is reducing our options.

    How else can we get the “take-off-every-zig” release?

  2. Stephen Smoogen

    Halloween.. the release Red Hat Fall/Winter release has been trying to make since RHL-0.9… and pretty much every Halloween/IT thing used to link back to Red Hat :).

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