Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Time for a name change?

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Posted by Tapiwa Sibanda on
Like Paul, a lot of these names with Latin and Greek 'meanings' are totally foreign to me. Very few people know that Nike is the Greek god of victory. But they do not need to know this to appreciate the brand. I think one of the reasons is the ease with which it flows off the tongue.

The organisation I work for is going through a similar rebranding exercise. Defining the brand et al was the easy part. Coming up with the name is proving more difficult. The marketing company that is conducting the branding exercise had their way of thinking, and one of their strong points was..... Latin based/derived names. I think this is all the rage. The workshops they conducted were not too dissimilar to what is described in this article at Salon.com.

All I am saying is that whatever name we come up with, should not be gimicky, (and I think Latin names at the moment are... a couple of ears ago, it was miXED letter sizes aD openACS mySQL etc).

I particularly like something neutral. My current favourites are oaks, and oasis. Here is another excellent article on naming, and name changes.

Don, I think I failed to explain myself regarding oasis4. What I was saying was having the product called oasis4 forever(harking to the OACS 4 origins). The current version could be oasis4 v5.0 or release 5.0 or whatever. future versions would not be oasis5 or oasis6, but be oasis4 v5 or v5.1 etc. Again OS/2, Lotus 123, and 3M are some products that used this letter/number naming convention.

Throwing in the number at the end would help get a domain name like oasis4.org as opposed to oasis-development.org . While other posters have downplayed the importance of a domain name to match the project name, I think that for branding purposes, it does make a difference.

Another suggestions in the vein, would be 4oaks. While like apache, those that are really interested can be told that the name comes from the pronunciation of OACS which comes from open.... the name should speak for itself.