Importance of Brand Names

Today as I was finishing the works related to the Introduction of Free Software and remembering the cases we study in class. I remembered something I was willing to post since the beginning but never really got the time to do it.

And it was that studying the experiences of the first people that founded the principles of free software I realised that the brands or names that the people decide to put to new products (in our case software products) in the end affect a lot the decision if people really are going to support that new product or not. This is better understood with some examples.

The first example is the name of the GNU/linux distros, which most of the people (even though the FSF might disagree) call only by the name of linux. This example might sound a little dumb but my guess is that people prefers to simply call it linux because it is simpler and sound better for a brand, maybe more commercial. So even when we know the correct term should be GNU/linux, the one that peoples uses is linux.

Another better example is the way a lot of people reacted kind of against the new term of copyleft that Stallman created and promoted, because it sounded like it was something ilegal just for being the opposite of copyright (in a exactly written sense). But when people of creative commons created something that anymore sounded like the opposite, and even sounded like something positive like share-a-like people started to like it.

And the final example is when a software gets closed and the community makes a fork, theres is a portion of people that stops feeling identified with the new fork project because when the name changes they feel is not the same (even though we know it is the same, it’s just a fork!)

So the conclusion of today post is that in order to get to a great mass of people with your software or to support your cause,  maybe technical people should also worry a little bit about marketing and commercial things as the name in the beginning, even though when we know more important always will be the functionality!

Hey who knows… maybe if Stallman instead of calling the GNU (GNU is Not Unix) project, he would have simply called it Nunix (Not Unix) the people might be happier saying that they use Nunix distros for being a more commercial shorter name, and Stallman would be happier for having more of the credit hehe 😀