451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
What’s in a name? Still open source
Jay Lyman, March 31, 2010 @ 3:39 pm ETWe industry analysts sometimes get a chuckle or two out of vendor names. Sometimes it’s a new vendor and we are left wondering, what were they thinking? Sometimes people take a vendor’s name and make fun or pun out of it. More seriously, though, we do continue to see vendors that focus and center their technology and business on open source software among the most frequent name changers in the industry. The reason is fairly simple: the name of the open source project is usually what people think of when the project is successful.
A few of years ago, we saw a spate of open source name changes, including Likewise and SpringSource. The reasoning then seems to remain the case today: the positive association of open source with cost savings and the positive connotations of an open source project in the enterprise outweigh any disconnect or disassociation with the project. This seems true even though differentiation from open source projects was a key challenge among vendors we polled recently for our report on sales and marketing for open source software.
This week, we were reminded the value often still lies with the name of the project, despite differentiation or branding advantages, as Reductive Labs, the server management and automation software startup that hosts and provides enterprise support for the open source Puppet automation framework, announced its name change to Puppet Labs. It makes sense and highlights the importance of open source software projects and communities in today’s enterprise IT.
Updated note: I also wonder whether the large number of open source projects and related commercial vendors in cloud computing will produce any similar name changes in the near future?
Comments (4) Categories: Software
Yeah, we fought the change for ages, but we kept having to introduce ourselves as “Reductive Labs, the Puppet People”, which got tiring.
Thanks for posting, Luke. I think this is pretty common in commercial open source. What’s interesting to me is to see the dichotomy of the challenge (differentiation) and opportunity (association) when working with an open source project in the enterprise. Hopefully, you won’t have to do as much explaining, other than maybe clarifying you do not do kids’ birthdays (which would probably be an issue if you were named ‘The Puppet People).’
Thanks again,
JL
I agree.
Especially in open source, the value of the brand lies in the product (since in a lot of cases, initially there simply is no organization or company behind the open source initiative). Once the product gets a lot of fans, a commercial organization is put next to it – but the brand value is then already with the product.
In the proprietary world, usually this is 180 degrees different – although here companies often choose to (partially) brand their products with the company name as well, to make this association as well.
Best,
Reint Jan
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