[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Is it time to begin retiring open-ils.org?

[Dan Scott]

2008/8/7 Karen G. Schneider <kgs at esilibrary.com>:
> When I got involved with Evergreen one of my questions was "What is
> 'open-ils'?" I found out it was an early name for the software code that
> would become Evergreen.
>
> I've been asking various people in the Evergreen community for a few weeks,
> "What do you think about the idea of retiring 'open-ils'... for example,
> moving to evergreen-ils.org (and have it also respond to evergreenils.org,
> and redirect from open-ils.org), eventually renaming the lists, IRC
> channels, etc.?" We reserved both domain names, by the way. So far everyone
> I've talked to likes the idea (or at least agrees with it). But that's still
> a small group of people.
>
> So now I'm surfacing the question to this list. What do you think? Is it
> time to have our web address, etc. reflect the name, Evergreen? I know my
> own reasons for preferring the change (my early name was Pooh Bear, but
> nobody except my mother calls me that any more...and you can't Google me up
> that way), but I'm just one voice in the community.
>
> (Incidentally, open-ils will probably never really "go away"--it's embedded
> in parts of Evergreen's code. So we'd have that nostalgic connection.)

I'm in favour of this, in general. I would especially like to change
the IRC channel name to #evergreen instead of the rather unwieldy
#openils-evergreen (a few of us hang out at #evergreen today, but it's
silent).
is.

Question: will the domain name, mailing lists, etc continue to be
owned by GPLS, or will it be taken over by Equinox (whois says Equinox
registered evergreen-ils.org back in July, presumably to avoid the
curse of domain name squatters), or by some other entity? For the
paranoid amongst us, this is where an Evergreen Software Foundation or
something like that could play a role. I'm not worried, personally,
but we should be clear about changes that might have side effects
beyond just the name.

As an aside, in my few minutes of spare time today I took a small step
to improve general search results for Evergreen-related content. I
modified all of the titles of the pages on the main Web site from
"Open-ILS.org | Page title" to "Page title: Evergreen open source
library system" following the principle of most important concept
first, followed by the name of the software and a description of the
software. I didn't want to get into overkill or hyperbole (like "Page
title: Evergreen - service-oriented, scalable, secure, open source
library system" - or "Page title: Evergreen - stable, robust,
flexible, secure, user-friendly open source library system" if we
borrow directly from http://open-ils.org/mission.php). The description
can easily be changed if we arrive at a consensus on a tag line (heck,
for that matter, everything else can be changed too).

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University