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0003-name-change-plan.md 5.93 KiB

Plan name change

  • Date proposed: 2025-03-04
  • PMCR ID: !6

Summary

After annoucing a name change in our blog, we will have to take extra steps in the implementation of the decision for a new name.

Motivation

Duing a brand change is always a risky decision. The team agreed on it after many discussions, and with some kind of general consensus, despite not everybody fully agreeing. Extending on the discussion in the blog post:

Benefits of a name change

  • postmarketOS only reflects a fraction of what the project is, and could be. The best example is Fairphone 4 and 5 support being added on release-day. A new name could still reflect the sustainability aspect of the project, without exclusively referring to one very limited aspect of sustainability.
  • It is hard to pronounce. This is specially a problem when doing outreach to non-native English speakers. This is a great problem if we want to grow as a community and reach out of the hacker world.
  • The capitalization is awkward, as easily becomes obvious in the first bullet point of this point.
  • An easier to pronounce and less specific name is certainly a better branding to approach less-technical people that might already know about what postmarketOS is.
  • postmarketOS had very little chances of being accepted as a trademark, leaving us in quite a vulnerable position against trolls. This came after discussions with trademark lawyers.

Problems of a name change

  • Some people might feel alienated by it. Change is always hard, and we did not do a great outreach before-hand. We might have also failed to explain some of our rationale.
  • Part of the reasons for name change come from a goal to expand the horizonts of the project outside a group of very-technical hackers. This might be hard to explain, and might not seat well with some.
  • postmarketOS is already a well-recognized brand, and easy to find online. We might loose some of that momemtum with a new name. However, we shoot high, and it would be fair to assume that postmarketOS is only known by a tiny fraction of the people that might at some point be able to use a device with our operating system installed. So this might only be a relative downside.
  • The rebranding might cause technical disruption, reason for which this PMCR exists.

In addition to this, a name change needs work. I personally do not consider that a downside. The work will be put by motivated individuals working as volunteers. People work on what they find best, and I do not consider it a downside when people do volunteer work on their own will. When volunteer work applies, it is not always for granted that people will do the same amount of work on some other part of the project. They might simply not do it.

Consequences

A name change could have the following consequences:

  • An easier to pronounce name, that will be more appealing and easy to share outside the group of people that don't yet know the project.
  • Allow the project to not appeal to a single and very specific scope within sustainability.
  • Avoid having to correct people over a non-intuitive capitalization.
  • Having a name that could be defended and trademarked.

It also carries some risks:

  • Alienating part of the community and causing some social backslash
  • Requiring a transition for projects and branding
  • Losing some recognition short-term. However, that does not seem to have been an issue in similar projects that renamed around us.
  • We choose a name that people don't identify with, or that is unnecessarily "empty".

Draft implementation plan

The plan has too parts:

Finish making the decision

  1. Set a deadline for the collection of names in the form
  2. Discuss different alternatives withing CC and TC team
  3. Research trademarks of the alternatives. postmarketOS was not possible to trademark.
  4. Come with a set of preferred alternatives (2, 3, 4?), and vote on them. Voting should probably be done in a way that people's preferrences are respected (and not top 1). Asking for votes outside the team was deemed not-appropriate due to the risk of trolling (e.g: people registering domains or trademarks). Finding some alternative so it can be discussed with a broader community would be great.

Actually implement the name change

I'm sure I'm missing things. Filling this out is one of the main reasons to open this PMCR early

  1. Before going public, buy associated domain(s)
  2. Make it public, with a rationale on the decision
  3. Code/Reaname changes:
    1. pmaports: packages with postmarketos in the name, adding "provides" for backwards compatibility
    2. bpo and pmbootstrap code changes (with alias/symlink to old name)
    3. postmarketos.org
    4. Visible parts of build.postmarketos.org
    5. Wiki branding
  4. (Concurrently to point above) Infra changes
    1. Point new domain to gitlab.postmarketos.org and wiki.postmarketos.org
    2. Deploy website(s) to the new domain:
    3. Add new aliases for matrix rooms
    4. Rename gitlab group and repositories with the name
    5. Create email aliases for everybody?
  5. Do a blog post as retrospective

The proposer

Pablo Correa Gomez, a Core Contributor. I am basically opening this so we can start discussing on things that need change, and start drafting a plan. I do not have infra access, but could totally do any parts of the other work.

Blocking issues

  • Decide on voting mechanism. We need to make sure that we have a voting process that is fair with a situation that is not black and white, but people might have multiple acceptable preferences.
  • Decide whether we want to the keep the old websites frozen in time with some disclaimer or redirect to the new ones (with or without disclaimer?)