[lug] 'red hat - the new redmond?' the brand is bad

[Nate Duehr]

Rob Mohr said:
> I, for one, believe Red Hat needs a more savvy, hip name.
>
> And the Red Hat icon or logo is almost too dorky to to believe.  It
> reminds me of the red top of Ronald McDonald, yuck.
>
> Just what is the genesis of the name Red Hat?  (Remember the TV
> commercial when the man says "I named it Daves Good Stuff."   And his
> wife bites back with "How long did it take you to think that one up?"

One of the founders of the company (can't remember if it was Bob Young or
Marc Ewing) used to wear a Red fedora around campus in college.  He became
known (like a lot of us around our family/friends, etc.) as the "computer
guy" that could fix things on people's computers.
People would say, "If you need help with your computer, ask that guy who's
always wearing that red hat."
Or something like that...

So when they were looking for a name for their custom Linux Distro,
well... at the time it probably seemed very appropriate.
The fedora certainly is more professional than the stupid BSD Daemon.  (GRIN)

Or for that matter, any of Sun's idiotic claims... "The network is the
computer."  Great, I'll just run right out and buy a few more $19.95
Ethernet switches to run my mail servers on...
Or everyone believing that professional RF engineers actually use a cell
phone and say "Can you hear me now?" to test their networks... but I
suppose a guy in a van covered with antennas and filled with racks thaat
contain spectrum analyzers and RF service monitors, or some poor guy
hanging from his harness on a tower trying to replace an antenna that's
been out in a salt-air environment near the coasts that's rusted itself to
all of its hardware isn't nearly as much fun.  Plus most of those vans
would be more of an advertisement for Agilent (the old HP test-gear
division) than Verizon, for sure.  (GRIN)
(Or, as one of my friends puts it... "Hey!  Get your reality the hell out
of my fantasy!")
-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com


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