[yocto-ab] coming to terms with Yocto Project compliance terms

[Osier-mixon, Jeffrey]

 Call me pedantic, but the current terms for our branding compliance
program bother me.

The primary clue is that one is an adjective ("compatible") and one is a
noun ("participant"), but really the main issue is that they describe
different things. In a philosophical sense, the terms have similar
meanings: things that are compatible with each other interoperate in
cooperative ways, while things that participate with each other form pieces
of the same whole entity. However, they are fundamentally different from a
practical standpoint. One can participate in a project without creating
compatible results, and one can create compatible products without
participating.

I was going to propose that we come up with new terms, but frankly it took
us 2 months to come up with terms that are acceptable to both the Yocto
Project AB and the Linux Foundation, so I am loathe to mess with them.
Instead, I would like to further refine what each term means.

- Yocto Project Participant: an individual or group that participates at
some level in the project, as defined by the questionnaire.

- Yocto Project Compatible: a product or project that interoperates with
the Yocto Project tools.

Thus, participants are people (or organizations of people), while anything
described as "compatible" means what it says - it works with the YP tools.
The only proposed change in the registration structure would be the
addition of a "project name" field in the Compatible registration process
and some clearer explanatory text.

I can picture the first reaction from AB organizations being "that dilutes
the Compatible status". I would suggest that it actually enhances it: the
value of the brand is based on ubiquity, not scarcity. Actually, that holds
for the whole project.

I'd like to discuss this in today's AB meeting, hopefully we won't have to
spend a lot of time on it.

-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon http://jefro.net/blog
Yocto Project Community Manager @Intel http://yoctoproject.org
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