After reading Aaron’s blog, slowly all marketing lessons I had at school returned. One of the important lessons I learned that you always should prevent product names to become brand/corporate or a generic name.

The reasoning behind that theory can be found on internet on numerous places, but one of the reasons is that it can get difficult to get a trademark on a product name which has become a generic name.

Now when I joined KDE, those two were already the same. It is pretty difficult to separate them again later. I’ve not heard of a case where it worked, but that should not stop us from doing it (I believe we have done more things people said were impossible ;-))

But there is an additional problem. Say we have renamed the KDE-project to Obelix. What would be the difference? KOffice is then a product of the Obelix-project, but it still depends in the same way on KDE, but still is not part of KDE as Askie mentioned and which is the reason for this discussion.

In other words. Even when you rename the KDE-project to Obelix, applications which are based on KDE-libraries are still called KDE-application, but are not shipped with the KDE-desktop, so the confusion stays exactly the same.

One way around this is to rename the libs of KDE to something else, say Sidonia. Then you would have a KDE-desktop based on the Sidonia-core and ‘external’ applications based on Sidonia-core. KOffice is no longer a KDE application, it only uses the same libraries/core.

I hope you understand what I mean ;-), I want to point out that renaming the project or desktop is not the thing we should do. We should instead give the libs (on which the other applications depend) a different name then the KDE applications which are released with KDE.