[haiku] Re: From OpenBeOS to Haiku
- From: "Michael Phipps" <michael.phipps@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:05:29 -0400
I guess this is my cue to stroke my long white beard and get the kids to gather
around the fireplace while I tell tales of lost days. :-D
The decision to change the name came about from fear, mostly. My fear of
getting sued personally for trademark infringement. Palm had bought the BeOS
intellectual property including trademarks. I really liked the OpenBeOS name.
We held a contest for names. We received a very large number (somewhere in the
neighborhood of 7000). Stuart McCoy (our Creative Design Team Lead) and I went
through the list and weeded out things that were not acceptable - garbage
posts, anything obviously referencing Be/BeOS, anything that was (in our
opinions) stupid, etc. We came up with a fairly long list, still - I think
around 100.
We batted them around in an Admin meeting on IRC. The conversation was long and
heated. During that time, Bruno said something to the effect of "We should just
call it Walter" (named after Garfield the Cat's fish, IIRC. Stuart, not having
met Bruno, took him seriously and said "If you call it that, I will quit".
Bruno responded "You just don't like it because you couldn't come up with a
logo for it". Now, I have to mention that one of our running jokes in the
Admin meetings was about being Trout Slapped (a Monty Python reference). Stuart
got quiet for about 5 minutes and came back with the Walter logo that you see
on Dauwalder.net and said "there's your logo. I still hate the name!".
We decided to have a vote. We narrowed the list to about 30 of the best and
made a web page to vote. There were thousands of votes received. The admin team
voted separately. I took the community votes and the admin team votes and
compared them. The votes were to rank your favorites 1-5. The interesting thing
is that almost everyone rated Haiku in their top 5. I did some different
methods to determine the winner and every one came up Haiku. Stuart did the
original Haiku logo and I had t-shirts made.
I did the paperwork to become a non-profit organization and filed it with New
York state and with the US Government, but we did not announce the name.
I was driving from my then home in Rochester NY to Columbus for our first Users
Group (named WalterCon because, as DarkWyrm said, we didn't want to call it
HaikuCon - that would give the name away!) when I got a call on my cell phone
from the examiner for the US Govt - he asked me some questions and gave me
verbal approval. I had a lot of good news at that WalterCon. :-)
That WalterCon spawned many good quotes and a lot of fun. I miss those days.
Michael
-----Original Message-----
From: "Colin Gnther" [coling@xxxxxx]
Date: 04/15/2009 09:11
To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [haiku] From OpenBeOS to Haiku
I'd like to get some infos about the time when Haiku's name was "born".
Are there any Discussions about project name suggestions? Was there a
vote about the name to choose? What happened to the content of
www.openbeos.org? Besides wikipedia there is little stuff about Haiku's
history.
Appreciate your help
colin
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