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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

What the guys-in-suits made them do.

Hey, OSM is going back to the name Pajamas Media:
[O]h, what a drubbing we took. Many, many readers pointed out to us that OSM™ was an oxymoron; the open source tech community expressed concern; and a very fine gentleman named Christopher Lydon at Open Source (www.radioopensource.org) politely pointed out that we might be trampling on his space. ...

[T]he whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity.
Even me? My biggest problem with the name "Open Source Media" was not the wound imagery ("open sores"), but that is was so thuddingly dull and corporate-sounding -- as if they hoped to suck the life out of blogging.
So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople--we did as we were told.

Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a "branding" company....

Enough said. So, in the spirit of "open source," we thought we’d tell you the real story behind the reason for our name change. And hope that our corporate parents will be satisfied with good grades and healthy revenue.
They're not the guys-in-suits. Some other guys, who once pushed them around, are the guys-in-suits.

Now that the name has been changed, will there be other changes? Will the site fill up with exciting, interesting material? Because it's the lack of good stuff to read that has always been their main problem. Did the guys-in-suits make that happen?

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