I agree completely with everything you said, and also prefer the name Tangram for all the reasons you list. It would be great if you could cross-post this comment to the Bugzilla entry and ask the committers to express their opinions.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=277947

Regards,

— Patrick

I agree with your interpretation of the results and made much the same case in the Bugzilla entry.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=277947

My suggestion was that we take one of the most popular names (Aurora or Tangram) and run it directly against Eclipse RCP in a survey. There did not seem to be much support for this approach, however.

I think the key here is that the committers are the ones who can really make this happen. So if you feel strongly about this, comment on the Bugzilla entry above and ask the committers what they think should be done. If the committers ask that the second survey be run, I’d be happy to do it.

Regards,

— Patrick

There are a few other problems I see and experience daily with the name Eclipse RCP:
- a lot of Google searches end up being about the Eclipse IDE
- clients and other developers who never used it think it’s Eclipse IDE, that the result will look like it ; sometimes they’re prejudiced against Eclipse IDE (because of being “bloated” and “slow”, their words) and that makes it even harder to convince to go the Eclipse RCP route.

I personally voted for Tangram as it is a relatively low used keyword and it represents well the modular / assembly nature of RCP. Also, I believe it is a word that is pronounced the same in most languages (like many Asian words).

Creating a brand from scratch takes time, and we Eclipse RCP developers are used of the concept of “Eclipse RCP”, so we don’t see anymore how wrong the name is, but the reaction of the people I sell Eclipse to (and of my company) is revealing.

Look how quick the brands Hadoop or Joomla! gained value. I can hardly remember the name before Joomla!’s fork, while at the time it forked people said it was strong and the fork wouldn’t work without the name… Well, after a Google search, it was called: Mambo. I totally forgot about that one.

If we keep on using Eclipse RCP, we can expect some more visibility as the platform gets a wider audience, but we will forever be stuck in the situation given the visibility of Eclipse IDE (which is clearly the winner in the IDE space in the companies I worked for).

However, if we are to change the Eclipse RCP name, we must do it by the time e4 is released because establishing the new brand will take time!

So people say: Apache HTTPd was Apache’s flagship product and now they succeeded in making people see Apache as a collection of tools/frameworks (most for Java).

I am not sure the contexts are the same here, but it certainly was a feat that I am not sure the Eclipse community will be able to accomplish (the communities are also very different).

Finally, if the Eclipse community were to choose another name for e4 RCP, nothing would be lost. It would be marketed as a new name for Eclipse RCP, and clients who already know about RCP could be told “it’s Eclipse RCP’s new version”. People who see value in Eclipse IDE could be told “it’s Eclipse Aurora/whatever, the framework on which Eclipse IDE is built”. For the rest, it could be simply Tangram (or any other name), a modular, next-gen framework for developing JVM-based applications (if e4 keeps its promise to bring more languages in!).

So I agree with Egon, there is no majority for RCP; there were multiple votes and people who chose the “least harm” probably cast a vote for RCP. I think RCP should have been out of this first vote, and in the next vote it should have been a RCP vs new name vote.

I understand your decision to stop the process given the reluctance of some (cf Bugzilla) but I am afraid that this is our last “go” at this.

I believe an idea has to be proposed a few times before it makes its way (and there is sufficient debate), and the first time the answer is often negative. We cannot know if this answer has more to do with the changing of the name being a bad idea, or simply the conservative side of the human nature, but it would be sad to just let it go without asking again with a poll (with fewer options). We need to do what’s best for Eclipse and the ecosystem around it.

Another perspective on the results is that 64.2% (almost two thirds) of the votes were _against_ “RCP”. So may be a more thorough investigation than a web based survey. The Schulze method[4] looks interesting, as it satisfies many voting criteria and has already been implmented at debian for example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_(voting)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

Perhaps you can rerun the survey, but now with only the top 5 names. Eclipse RCP will not necessarily get the most votes again.

Thanks a lot for taking the initiative on this, even though it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to get rid of “Eclipse RCP” as the name for the rich client platform.

The only problem I see with the name “Eclipse RCP” going forward is our experimental “foray” into the web UI space where “rich client” is not entirely accurate anymore. But I guess we’ll be able to deal with that as things become more concrete.