Hi everyone. I have a terminology request. Red Hat often has to field questions from customers, partners, analysts, and the public at large about whether Red Hat offers support for community projects they underwrite, such as Fedora. We in Fedora do our best to make our community supported model clear to all. [1] An important part of Red Hat's way of explaining this is to make a distinction between "products" — sold and supported — and upstream *projects*. When we in Fedora talk about "products" for the new, separate Cloud, Server, and Workstation builds, we're not referring to something sold and supported. Instead, we mean something focused and more intentionally planned and targeted than before. We obviously have no designs on the commercial marketplace. But while *we* know that, Red Hat's product management (see, there's that word) folks are telling me that casual use of the word "product" by the Fedora team is really making their job harder and, more importantly, is confusing the marketplace. We recognize that a great deal of energy over many years has gone into distinguishing RH's products from community (including Fedora) projects. It's not our intention, of course, to undermine that distinction. As a result, I'd like to ask us all to avoid using the word "product" in Fedora marketing and communications, such as in the upcoming F21 GA announcement. We're not, by the way, being asked to expunge the word "product" from our vocabulary in an Orwellian kind of way — it's okay if it comes up naturally in internal discussion. But it would be helpful if we stay mindful of the possible confusion such a word creates in communications outside the project. So what should we use instead? I suggest we use the word "flavor" for our separate builds. This fits nicely in Fedora's (English) alliterative lexicon. We might also use "variant" or "target" or "development platform" or whatever where appropriate. Translators might (rightly) ask how "flavor" would be translated. The "flavor" idiom may not make sense in every language in the sense of food. I suggest in case of difficulties, this be translated in the same way as the term "flavor" is translated when used in particle physics to describe categories of the subatomic particles called quarks. This is the same sense we're using, and these categories also have nothing to do with flavor as it describes food, so the translation should work fine. [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicating_and_getting_help -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader -- marketing mailing list marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx List info or to change your subscription: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
