[advocacy-discuss] Re: [ogb-discuss] Re: [osol-discuss] Logo/Mascot for OpenSolaris

[Donal McMullan]

Darren.Reed at Sun.COM wrote:
 > I don't have any suggestions on who the illustrators should be,
 > I just recognise that it isn't likely anyone inside a community that
 > is predominately made up of those engaged in the development
 > of opensolaris is likely to be as capable in this area.

The Pentium 4 exemplifies the technology you get when the marketing 
department does the engineering.[1] If we're allowed to come up with a 
symbol to represent OpenSolaris ourselves, it's likely to be the Pentium 
4 of mascots. I hope we're a little more ambitious than that. :)

Scott Adams puts it well:
http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~adonovan/dilbert/show.php?day=14&month=12&year=2003

I don't want to stem the flow of ideas, but I'd also like to hear 
people's voices on:
1. How you think OpenSolaris is currently positioned?
2. Where you think it should and realistically could be positioned?
3. How do we get from 1 to 2?
4. How can branding and messaging help to effect that shift?

So - we can approach this more as a problem to be solved than as a 
beauty parade. How do we want to position Indiana/OpenSolaris, not just 
among the open OSes, but also alongside OSX and Windows?

Does OpenSolaris have a "cuddly-ness" deficit to make up? It's not 
obvious to me that a cuddly mascot will help with positioning Indiana as 
the de facto standard platform for developers[2].

Is branding one of the things that the Linux or *BSD communities have 
gotten resoundingly right, or we should be cautious about following 
their lead?[3]

Whose visual identity do you really admire? How does it express their 
values? What are the values that we want to communicate to the 
developers we think would benefit from OpenSolaris?

Thanks if you made it this far. I'm un-cross-posting this reply from OGB 
discuss.

Donal

[1] The "Screw performance... give me GHz" school of chip design.
[2] Insert your favourite mission statement here.
[3]  Initially, the penguin was a bit of an albatross for companies 
trying to sell Linux into corporate accounts.