Re: [ide-dev] Photon IDE, by Eclipse

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for your answer. As usual, I really like your constructive way of disagreeing and your answer unveiled some new possible paths of improvements on this specific topic. Answers inline.

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Ed Merks <ed.merks@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I believe that Mike has mentioned that establishing a strong brand takes millions of dollars over several years.

Sure, but it's IMO not a reason for not trying some free-ish increments over the next months ;)

The Eclipse brand is well-established and strong.  One problem---the one I believe you are focused on---appears to be that the brand is strongly (too strongly?) associated with the Java IDE,

Yes, that's what my problem is. And both the recent branding survey and recent informal chats I've had show that most developers simply still don't understand that Eclipse Vert.x, Eclipse Paho are not at all related to the IDE. It has even been an issue for some project (an real effort) to be able to use the "Eclipse" prefix without confusing their community.

So at that point, it seems to me that the Eclipse word being too much tied to the IDE is adding some difficulty to attract new projects and to help incoming projects in getting a clearer brand. It's more the other way round: entering the Eclipse world will require a project to set up a lot of strategies to remove possible confusion.

so your solution appears to be to replace Eclipse with Photon (or with ${whatever}) in as many places as possible to try to change that situation.

Yes, this and you previous sentence capture accurately my goal and proposal.

It is the Eclipse Foundation as an organization that needs to ensure its brand is distinguished from the Java IDE

What do you mean by the Eclipse Foundation, the EMO? If so, I'm not sure about it. Eclipse is well-established as you say, and I don't think EMO can easily fix branding confusion without the assistance of the Eclipse Community.

That's the reason for this whole thread: I believe that us, as community members, can and should be ready to change the branding of Eclipse IDE in order to make other Eclipse projects and EMO better empowered by the "Eclipse" brand without being always wrongly associated with the IDE.

and it is each of Eclipse's non-JDT projects that need to ensure its Eclipse sub-brand is also strong.

By non-JDT you mean non-desktop IDE in general?

Anyway, wouldn't branding each other Eclipse project be easier if the Eclipse name was progressively cleared from its "Desktop IDE" signification? I think it would, and that as a consequence, it would reduce the effort in branding all other Eclipse projects, and would result in a more efficient branding of all other Eclipse projects.

But I don't feel that this should be done at the expense of the IDE itself; the IDE will not benefit from a weakening of its established strong brand.

Sure, the IDE itself wouldn't benefit. Most other projects would.

I also feel that the recent creation of the Java EE project as an Eclipse-hosted project will go a long way toward changing perceptions about all that it means to be be "Eclipse"

The same was said about Eclipse IoT years ago IIRC, and as far as I know, it has improved branding for sure, but not resolved all issues. I don't expect EE4J to do much more magic here.

I also question, what will really change if all the users should see Eclipse as a Java IDE suddenly realize that Eclipse is just a great place to host open source projects.  Will they come out in droves to host their projects at Eclipse?

 

At least, it imagine it would create new opportunities that are currently blocked by this "Eclipse" word sending wrong signals to the majority of people (according to the branding survey).

And would we even want that if there were no associated financial investment in the Eclipse foundation?

I believe it's a chicken-egg problem between new projects and new members. And that if it becomes an issue, the Foundation/Community could set additional requirements in the processes to accept a project or not. Anyway, that's not really about branding so let's skip this topic for another thread.

But let's just suppose for a moment that this were a brilliant idea.   Who is planning on rewriting all the long-established documentation to correct all the technical details related to folder and file names?  E.g., to point out that it's now photon.ini you need to edit, not eclipse.ini, unless you have an older version.  Who will migrate all the scripts that make assumptions about file/folder names that will need to be rewritten.  Will I be able to update from Oxygen to Photon; goodness knows we never seem to get that quite right?    Will there now be a .photon hidden folder in the home folder and will I have to migrate my .eclipse content to the .photon folder and will that be annoying if I ever use an older and a new Eclipse IDE at the same time?
So my point is that surely even if it were brilliant to rebrand the IDE, which I doubt, we most definitely should restrict ourselves to the visible branding (splash screen, translable strings, web pages) and avoid changing technical artifacts names because that will be highly disruptive to any existing documentation, scripts, and other infrastructure.

Ok, I understand these points and agree with them.

So now, let's just assume a proposal which would simply change the following compared to current delivery (Photon can be ${whatever}):

* relabel Eclipse IDE to Eclipse Photon IDE in the visible places inside the product (title bar, about...)

* Keep the Photon name in 2019, 2020 and so on (then we're back to previous threads and https://kichwacoders.com/2016/04/28/why-its-time-to-kill-the-eclipse-release-namesneon-oxygen-etc/ and https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=493490 which is still a good proposal according to many people)

This is 0 disruption and it allows to start building progressively a brand on top of the new name. The technical names wouldn't change, scripts wouldn't need to change.

In any case, I'm realizing that https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=493490 is a pre-requisite before trying to change the brand. And it seemed to be consensual enough. What would be the next steps towards resolution of these one? Having the Planning Council agreeing on it?