Oh, also one other bit of history here: we originally used the term “Product”. The idea was: rather than just putting things out there that we hope people might like, we’d actually research needs and develop technical plans to solve problems, as one might do to bring a successful commercial product to market — even though we of course aren’t selling or supporting anything, we still can benefit from that kind of approach. In full disclosure, this may have coincided with me taking this training https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/course/product/focus/ (which I really liked and still recommend)!
(And, again, I think time has shown that that definitely worked.)
So, see for example this ticket:
Issue #4: proposed general criteria for Fedora products - tickets - Pagure.io
… which is also where we formally agreed on the definition I’m still using in all of the above.
And, again in the interest of transparency, this is the ONE SINGLE TIME Red Hat corporate has gotten really upset with me for something as Fedora Project Leader (both then and since), and it was a minefield I hadn’t even known I was stumbling into.
Part of the story Red Hat tells itself about its own success is that it figured out how to make products from open source projects. This was part of the whole thing of “Red Hat Linux Project” vs RHEL at the dawn of (Fedora) time, and it’s part of how Red Hat still describes what it does to customers who don’t quite get it. Generally, I don’t think people outside of Red Hat – or outside of marketing at least – really make that distinction, but Red Hat feels like it’s not just words but essential to the company’s identity. So, I was like, okay, fine, well, it’s just words to me, so this happened and we ended up picking “Edition” as the term because no one else liked my suggestion of “Fedora Flavors”.