After a one and a half year selection process, the new name of the operating system formerly known as postmarketOS has been announced during the mystery talk of our very own conference. From now on this project is known as Nura!
Nura comes as an abbreviation of Nuraghe, which are ancient (3000 BC and older) granite structures found in Sardinia in Italy, many of which still stand today. The deeper meaning is the stability and the resistance to millenniums, which fits well with the project as the idea has been from the start to keep devices our OS runs on useful for a long time. The name was contributed by Davide Depau as part of our initial request for community contributions for the new name.
Why are you renaming the project?
Through the years, most members of the team have experienced difficulties doing outreach for “postmarketOS” due to the complexity of the name. The name is long and can be very hard to pronounce in many languages. This also has the implication that it gets very hard to remember in those same languages.
The capitalization is also grammatically awkward, with lower-case “p” and “m” but upper-case “OS”. We have seen Postmarketos (PostMarketOS?, PostmarketOS?, post-market OS?) written in too many ways, which is confusing to both the reader and the writer.
Finally the name is descriptive. Although that can help people understand what the project is about, it also limits the scope of the project in ways that were out-of-touch with reality long ago, for example when PINE64 sold PinePhones with postmarketOS pre-installed. The name being descriptive also means it cannot be trademarked. We believe trademarks can be important, as it allows the project to protect users against fraudulent uses of the name, or users clearly misaligned with the project goals. A trademark for the new name has already been filled.
Domain and naming process
Although there is no public site in Nura.org, the domain is taken. We looked for alternatives and found the .eco domain, which is short for ecology. The .eco domain has strong policies which prevent abuse of the domain for greenwashing, adding another layer of accountability.
A selection team composed by Pablo, Pan, Ranny, and Sriram Ramkrishna was tasked to select good names from the 300+ the community shared. The team did multiple rounds through the list, evaluated pros and cons of different names, and came up with a proposal of 4 names for the team to choose from. Those names went through further triaging to make sure it didn’t have very problematic connotations in as many languages as we could find speakers. Nura was the name with the highest value, and received a 0.4 mean for a vote between -2 and 2.
Brand updates
Yes, the logo will remain. We really like the logo and its connection with our mission.
There are some small updates to the logo! Ranny identified and fixed some small design inconsistencies in the logo. Due to slightly more spacing between the arrows, it is now a bit more legible from further distances. Furthermore it is also now mathematically constructed, so anyone can reproduce it.
The renaming of all user-facing strings might take a while. If you notice a place where we missed something, any contribution in the form of Merge Requests to update it to Nura would be super helpful.