I may be going about this the wrong way, and if so I apologize inadvance. I started a thread in the Ubuntu community forums aboutchanging the name of the Gnome project to "Genome" to coincide with therelease of Gnome 3. Since the interface is getting a update, I reasonedthat the project itself, and the public perception thereof, should alsoget an update. Below if the relevant portion of that thread (note: theurl is http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1214808 , but let mefirst warn you that the discussion degraded early on, which is whatbrought me here). Again, I apologize if I'm breeching any points ofetiquette here. No offense is intended. Gnome 3: Change project name to "Genome." ________________________________________________________________________I recently ran across a post where a new user mistakenly (either typo orotherwise) referred to Gnome as "Genome", and it got me thinking... "Gnome" as the noun it has become, or as the acronym (GNU Network ObjectModel Environment) for which it was intended, no longer describes ormakes sense of what the interface has evolved into. People have beensaying this for a long time, and for a long time, I've wholeheartedlyagreed. This is especially true for the end user. Speaking for myself,the Gnome "foot" has no correllation to anything related to my desktopexperience. It only conjurs up images of Stallman's feet for some weirdreason, and although I love the guy and think he's absolutely brilliant,this disturbes me on a deep level. Likewise, the word "gnome" for meimmediately associates the Travel Gnome from the Travelocitycommericials--again, absolutely no correlation to my computingexperience. >From Wikipedia's article on Gnome: Quote:The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object ModelEnvironment by Elliot Lee, one of the authors of ORBit and the ObjectActivation Framework.[citation needed] It refers to GNOME’s originalintention of creating a distributed object framework similar toMicrosoft’s OLE.[6] This no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOMEproject, and the full expansion of the name is now considered obsolete.As such, some members of the project advocate dropping the acronym andre-naming “GNOME” to “Gnome”.[7] Holy wars aside, Gnome has more market share and mind share as "Linux"than any other desktop environment or window manager. This is dueprimarily to Red Hat's sponsorship (and Novel's default use of Gnome inSuSE), but also due to the popularity of Ubuntu. Not to mention, mostmajor FOSS projects that have come into popularity use GTK to hang theircode on (Open Office, Firefox, and now Google Chrome, for example).There's no arguing this on any level outside of zealotry or personalpreference. The modern perception of "Linux" (GNU/Linux) from the most popular andbacked distributions and applications are deeply tied to Gnome (or toGTK, depending on how you look at it). So in this era of the emergingLinux desktop, shouldn't the project name get a makeover? I think it'sfinally time. I suggest that the Gnome project renames itself to "Genome" and replacesthe big foot with something like a double-helix. Both the name and theimage are strong in the modern scientific context, and borrowing againfrom biology, more accurately reflects what the project has evolvedinto. Let's do some quick word association: - genome: biology, evolution; double-helix: biology, DNA = science- gnome: fantasy, role-playing games; big foot: paranormal, mysticism,urban legend= pseudoscience Ubuntu could even benefit from this change. They could call theirdefault theme, "The Human Genome Project." /discuss. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and possibly get this elevatedto the right forum or people.__________________Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. When he awoke heexclaimed: ``I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!'' -- The Tao of Programming Thanks for any consideration of feedback. -Rob _______________________________________________gnome-list mailing listgnome-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
