Why Are Operating System Version Names So Absurd? 460
jfruh writes "Apple's spent more than a decade on version 10 — or, rather, X — of its flagship operating system, with .x versions named after big cats (and many of them, it turns out, after the same big cats). Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after. And let's not even talk about Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1. Why is this area of software marketing so ridiculous?"
Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple never would've been able to convince the Mac faithful to purchase OPENSTEP 5.0, &c.
Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot trademark numbers.
Also, for most non-techies, it is easier to remember "Tiger" than "10.4"
Solaris? (Score:5, Insightful)
And Solaris 2.x is SunOS 5.x. There's the software version and then there's the marketing name. If you haven't noticed, Windows NT went 3.1, 3.5, 4.0, 2000, XP/2003, 7/2008, 2012, 8.
It's not really any more ridiculous than any other marketing effort.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1
This is a distinction between a brand name and a kernel version number. Why is this more absurd compared to "Precise Pangolin" for instance?
Regardless, I think you'll find names of almost any product in a sufficiently crowded marketplace become absurd as they try to differentiate themselves and also avoid stepping on any trademarked names. You see this with domain names in particular.
Because Marketing != Version Control (Score:5, Insightful)
Naming a product to sell it in a commercial market has got nothing to do with internal release milestones, and you don't have to be a marketing expert to realize that 'Windows 11' doesn't sound especially cool, whereas 'X' or 'Wild Giraffe' both sound awesome.
The question is more ridiculous than the discrepancy.
Newsworthy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Could we have a tag: 'newsworthy' - something to identify a story as being worth paying ANY attention to?
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot trademark numbers.
Also, for most non-techies, it is easier to remember "Tiger" than "10.4"
I'd disagree on the latter. Which came first, Debian Potatoe or Debian Sarge? Damfino (well, actually I do, but,...) However every noob knows 2005 is more recent than 2000.
Where I work, internally, its all git-flow, and our releases have really boring, yet informative, names which are basically of the format:
release/`date +%Y-%M-%d`
Like today's heroic effort would be release/2012-09-11
This date structure also helps with git-flow features, obviously you can't have two "add some bs" branches but you can have "2012-06-01-add-some-bs" and "2012-08-13-add-some-bs"
If one of my coworkers gets outta whack about last monday's release I know exactly what he's talking about, that would be release/2012-08-27 Or I can even find 2012-06-18. But "Rumbly Rumpelstiltskin v2.1D" WTF is that? thats just unprofessional.
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
I would wager the engineers play a big role in all these names. Just look at what happens when the are asked to start naming their servers....
Re:Solaris? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, not really.
Solaris is or at least was a package of software which contained SunOS, Openwindows and ONC.
You could license just the SunOS separately for an embedded devices like Fore which did ATM switches etc. did.
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Still better than their other naming convention, "The New iPad".
Not sure what the next one will be called..
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's harder to remember that Tiger is newer or older than Panther or Leopard.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Non-tech: "I remember it starts with a 'J' and um I remember something about an antelope, no, that's not right, um..."
Tech: "Do you mean Jaunty Jackalope?"
Non-tech: "Yes that's it! Jaunty Jackalope."
Re:And what's the deal with names anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't work that way, because there are only a few lines of Linux kernels and hundreds of distributions.
With Windows, you have a few lines of kernels too, but only a handful of distributions (a.k.a. home, professional, server, database server etc.pp.).
So yes, it's Windows NT 6.1 with the distributions Windows 7 Home and Professional and Windows 2010 Server. But look how many Linux distributions are currently shipping with Linux 3.0!
Re:And what's the deal with names anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Version numbers are entirely arbitrary. It's not like version 2 actually corresponds to the 2nd build is it...
Version numbers are a lot less arbitrary than artsy-fartsy names like "Dapper Drake" or "Mangled Melon" or whatever Ubuntu is up to today. Nobody said that version numbers match the "build", but they do match the releases.
I find it much easier to understand that CentOS 6.1 is a newer version than CentOS 6.0, for example, than trying to remember that "Killer Kangaroo" is newer than "Sloppy Sloth".
Why get upset when someone decides that OS 10 is something special, or that the first version will be 3, the second 3.1 and the third 3.14.
I don't think anyone does.
The real reason Windows has the version number... (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary, folks here and the TFA(didn't read fully!) seem to be missing the point about why the internal Windows Version is 6.1 for Windows 7. The reason is that a LOT of software, drivers and other utilities have this kind of code in them:
if(first letter of Windows Version Number) is not 6 Print 'Error, OS not compatible'
Even though the software is fully compatible with the OS(because they didn't change the driver model from Vista), the non updated software from old CDs etc. throw up this error. To get around this issue, Windows internally names it 6.1, so the offending software thinks it's on some Vista service pack. Also, this is an *internal* version number compared to Apple's and Ubuntu's OSes which are the marketing names, so I don't even see why this was brought up except as flamebait.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
But that causes problems too. When the old Rio Vista server gets repurposed as the second WebSense server, what do you call it? I've seen people include the OS, SQL, IIS versions (oops we upgraded it in place), the room number (moved that to our new location), physical vs virtual, etc. and within 3 years, it all worthless because it's all wrong (or wrong often enough not to be trusted).
I honestly wish that servers would be named after something like Star Wars planets or something, it actually gives them a character that you can remember instead of Win2008_IIS7_P_SantaAna (which is, of course, a Windows 2008 R2 instance running IIS 7.5 on a virtual machine in Amazon's cloud, but we can't change the name or everything will break). I would be much happier if it were just called OrdMantell.
Re:And what's the deal with names anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, you shouldn't try to remember that, since Ubuntu names in alphabetical order, just like Android.
So you not only need to know the artsy name like 'Zippered Zebra', but that all the names are in alphabetical order? Still, if you want to go back one version from "Quaint Quacker", what's the name you need to look up?
And when I look at my android device and is says that it is version 3.2, how am I supposed to know what artsy name has been applied to that? Is there some reason that anyone should have to waste time looking up the mapping from "4.1.1." to "Jelly Bean" so that one can find the appropriate web blog to ask questions on?
That will roll around in some half a dozen years, but Ubuntu also has YY.MM version numbers, so you know immediately that version 08.04 is over four years old.
Why would I know that? Do you mean they also mandate that their major releases match the last two digits of the year they came out? Good to know. Certainly not obvious.
Just as it is not obvious how "Lazy Llama" fits into the nn.nn numbering scheme.
Geeks make the OS. Geeks like the wacko names. Deal with it.
I do. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it certainly doesn't mean it is a good way of doing things. It is a fair question to ask whether this fanciful naming system is helping or hurting the adoption of Linux on the desktop. Do users like or dislike thinking about their desk computer running something called "Putrid Penguin"? Is it helpful if they have to wonder whether it would be good to upgrade from that to "Stagnant Sturgeon"?