[dotBen]

I'm sad RackSpace chose to market this effort under the term "Open Stack".

A number of us in the open web community have used that term to a great extent to talk about OpenID + OAuth + Portable Contacts + Open Social (http://therealmccrea.com/2008/09/19/joseph-smarr-at-web-20-o...)

Admittedly the initiative has lost momentum (for many reasons and factors) but things are still out there. This just creates confusion and branding collision.

I notice RackSpace is pushing a "TM" on their OpenStack branding, which calls into issue anyone using the term for it's prior and original meaning.

[bretpiatt]

I'm sorry, we didn't think the two communities would cause confusion. Almost everything you can name something these days will cause a "name collision" of sort. The infrastructure and application folks are pretty separated and so are the concepts so hopefully the context in which it is used will make it clear. Detail wise, the OpenID + OAuth... is "Open Stack" and this should be used only as "OpenStack".

[dotBen]

Hey Bret, I hear what you are saying. Yes, the infrastructure and application communities are separate. Yes OpenStack != "Open Stack".

But the wider communities; the customer communities and the developer communities are going to be in that overlap between both infrastructure and application.

And we both know that once your brand goes through 'the wash' of the media it's going to be munged into "Open Stack" as much as "OpenStack".

Sure everything has some kind of name collision but that's just indicates why more deeper investigation is required to ensure such collisions occur between two very different usages. It is disappointing in this instance that didn't occur.

(I'm guessing/assuming you are a RS employee...) you also haven't touched on the concern that RS is asserting a TradeMark on "OpenStack" which brings some concern into the existing publicity for the Open Stack concept.

[nailer]

Preamble: thanks for the software, looks awesome.

The problem is that the domains are very close. There's a lot of modern web apps are cloud based and use the open stack (I recall Mike Malone and Joe Stump doing a great talk at PyCon about these topics using that exact term). This makes searching really really annoying.

How about OpenSkies?

[smiler]

OpenSkies is an airline

[nphase]

For some reason your distinction of OpenStack vs Open Stack reminds me of the attempted trademarking of a smiley face by describing it as two dots and a half circle contained by a larger circle.

[patrickaljord]

It's called the Social Federated Web now or OStatus for the set of protocols.

http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/Main_Page

http://ostatus.org/