raronson
July 16th, 2009, 05:39 PM
I recently ran across a post where a new user mistakenly (either typo or otherwise) referred to Gnome as "Genome", and it got me thinking...
"Gnome" as the noun it has become, or as the acronym (GNU Network Object Model Environment) for which it was intended, no longer describes or makes sense of what the interface has evolved into. People have been saying this for a long time, and for a long time, I've wholeheartedly agreed. This is especially true for the end user. Speaking for myself, the Gnome "foot" has no correllation to anything related to my desktop experience. It only conjurs up images of Stallman's feet for some weird reason, and although I love the guy and think he's absolutely brilliant, this disturbes me on a deep level. Likewise, the word "gnome" for me immediately associates the Travel Gnome from the Travelocity commericials--again, absolutely no correlation to my computing experience.
From Wikipedia's article on Gnome:
The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment by Elliot Lee, one of the authors of ORBit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORBit) and the Object Activation Framework.[citation needed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed)] It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_object) framework similar to Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)’s OLE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding).[6] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#cite_note-5) This no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOME project, and the full expansion of the name is now considered obsolete. As such, some members of the project advocate dropping the acronym and re-naming “GNOME” to “Gnome”.[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#cite_note-naming-6)
Holy wars aside, Gnome has more market share and mind share as "Linux" than any other desktop environment or window manager. This is due primarily to Red Hat's sponsorship (and Novel's default use of Gnome in SuSE), but also due to the popularity of Ubuntu. Not to mention, most major FOSS projects that have come into popularity use GTK to hang their code on (Open Office, Firefox, and now Google Chrome, for example). There's no arguing this on any level outside of zealotry or personal preference.
The modern perception of "Linux" (GNU/Linux) from the most popular and backed distributions and applications are deeply tied to Gnome (or to GTK, depending on how you look at it). So in this era of the emerging Linux desktop, shouldn't the project name get a makeover? I think it's finally time.
I suggest that the Gnome project renames itself to "Genome" and replaces the big foot with something like a double-helix. Both the name and the image are strong in the modern scientific context, and borrowing again from biology, more accurately reflects what the project has evolved into. 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 their default theme, "Human Genome." Even Gnome's default mail client, "Evolution" would convey the message of sensible uniformity.
/discuss. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and possibly get this elevated to the right forum or people.
"Gnome" as the noun it has become, or as the acronym (GNU Network Object Model Environment) for which it was intended, no longer describes or makes sense of what the interface has evolved into. People have been saying this for a long time, and for a long time, I've wholeheartedly agreed. This is especially true for the end user. Speaking for myself, the Gnome "foot" has no correllation to anything related to my desktop experience. It only conjurs up images of Stallman's feet for some weird reason, and although I love the guy and think he's absolutely brilliant, this disturbes me on a deep level. Likewise, the word "gnome" for me immediately associates the Travel Gnome from the Travelocity commericials--again, absolutely no correlation to my computing experience.
From Wikipedia's article on Gnome:
The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment by Elliot Lee, one of the authors of ORBit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORBit) and the Object Activation Framework.[citation needed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed)] It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_object) framework similar to Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)’s OLE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding).[6] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#cite_note-5) This no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOME project, and the full expansion of the name is now considered obsolete. As such, some members of the project advocate dropping the acronym and re-naming “GNOME” to “Gnome”.[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#cite_note-naming-6)
Holy wars aside, Gnome has more market share and mind share as "Linux" than any other desktop environment or window manager. This is due primarily to Red Hat's sponsorship (and Novel's default use of Gnome in SuSE), but also due to the popularity of Ubuntu. Not to mention, most major FOSS projects that have come into popularity use GTK to hang their code on (Open Office, Firefox, and now Google Chrome, for example). There's no arguing this on any level outside of zealotry or personal preference.
The modern perception of "Linux" (GNU/Linux) from the most popular and backed distributions and applications are deeply tied to Gnome (or to GTK, depending on how you look at it). So in this era of the emerging Linux desktop, shouldn't the project name get a makeover? I think it's finally time.
I suggest that the Gnome project renames itself to "Genome" and replaces the big foot with something like a double-helix. Both the name and the image are strong in the modern scientific context, and borrowing again from biology, more accurately reflects what the project has evolved into. 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 their default theme, "Human Genome." Even Gnome's default mail client, "Evolution" would convey the message of sensible uniformity.
/discuss. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and possibly get this elevated to the right forum or people.