Rebranding OSI.

[Ross N. Williams]

At 10:54 PM -0400 12/8/2000, Russell Nelson wrote:
>We have since created the OSI Certified open source certification
>mark.  We've had no trouble defending that mark.

What you should do is invent an OSI Certified mascot. :-)

Everyone knows that if you want Linux you look for the penguin,
and if you want BSD you look for a deamon. The term "Open Source"
has caught on, but "OSI Certified" looks like "Open Standards Initiative"
or a million other expansions like that. Someone needs to make it
unambiguous somehow. Experience shows that, where words fail,
an animal can do the trick :-)

Unfortunately, O'Reilly have nearly used up all the animals. The last
time I looked, they were down to allocating the wood weevil or something :-)
But I'm sure OSI can find something.

What's needed is an animal that represents cooperation.

How about an ant? Ants cooperate like crazy and many-eyeballs debugging
is a bit antlike. So why not create a cartoon ant character who looks
friendly and industrious and trademark that? Maybe an ant with a
hard hat. Then when people see the ant, they know the software is
certified by "that well meaning open source crowd the name of whose
certification mark I forget". Unambiguous. If there's no ant, it's
not open. The new branding equation is:

   ANT == OPEN

:-)


Ross.

Dr Ross N. Williams (ross at rocksoft.com), +61 8 8232-6262 (fax-6264).
Director, Rocksoft Pty Ltd, Adelaide, Australia: http://www.rocksoft.com/ 
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