[OpenIndiana-discuss] The name: "OpenIndiana"

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Gabriel de la Cruz
<gabriel.delacruz at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, your question is a good one... is that name enough to "compete" with them?

I would have no issue recommending "OpenIndiana" in a board room to a
bunch of pointy-haired-bosses* - it sounds way more corporate than
Ubuntu, FreeBSD or CentOS, which I personally think sound "cheap".
When someone first suggested CentOS to me as an alternative to RHEL, I
was like "What?!". But over the years CentOS has gained an excellent
reputation and I have no doubt that installations of it exceed those
of RHEL significantly.

Perhaps I'm biased as I essentially chose the name, but I don't see an
issue with it. The biggest grumbles seemed to come from oldschool
bearded UNIX types who haven't gotten over /usr/gnu/bin being put at
the front of their PATH and who view Ian Murdock as the harbinger of
doom and all things evil.

The fact is we live in a world where every decent dictionary word is
in use by somebody, somewhere. *.com, *.net and *.org are taken. Heck,
in the UK/Europe we have some large banks called Smile and Egg. :-)
Sometimes you have to make tough choices. Although OpenIndiana is not
as sexy a name as "Solaris", the fact is, it was available and seemed
a pretty good choice.

If your bosses genuinely make business decisions based on trivialities
such as what something is called, then you probably have bigger
organisational issues than what OS your servers run :-P


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss