Merge pull request #386 from simonbaird/new-name-blog-post

Create a blog post about the new name

Author: simonbaird

website/content/posts/whats-in-a-name.md

@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+---
+title: 'Presenting "Conforma"'
+date: 2025-01-22T12:24:00-05:00
+author: "Simon Baird"
+---
+
+To make a long story short, this project has a new name. "Enterprise Contract"
+is now "Conforma". Read on for some background information about the name and
+why we decided to change it.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Origins
+
+The name "Enterprise Contract" has been around since the beginning. When a few
+bright Red Hatters were sketching out the plans for a new SLSA compliant
+internal build system based on OpenShift, Tekton, Tekton Chains, and Sigstore,
+verifying signatures and applying policies based on image attestations was a
+key piece of the design.
+
+One of the main design ideas was to allow development teams to own their build
+pipelines, leaving them free to innovate and iterate, but leverage the SLSA
+build provenance to provide a mechanism for release engineers and security
+experts to ensure the released artifacts met the required standards.
+
+If a container image passed "the Enterprise Contract" then it was considered
+releasable. And if it didn't pass, the tooling would produce clear explanations
+about why, and what needed to happen to get it passing.
+
+So we built the tool to do this artifact verification and policy checking, and
+called it "Enterprise Contract".
+
+"Enterprise" in Red Hat vernacular can mean something like "ready for
+prime-time", not just production-ready, but ready for use by Red Hat customers.
+Think "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" for example. And if we say that "contract"
+means the set of transparent and agreed-upon policies, then you could say the
+name describes the idea well.
+
+## Why Change?
+
+That said, the name has some shortcomings. It's long, and often makes people
+think of corporate HR, or some kind of workplace legal document.
+
+Also, for open-source software in general, and the Fedora community in
+particular, the terms "Enterprise" and "Contract" are kind of big red flags,
+both legally and philosophically.
+
+Fedora is looking at using Konflux for its own build system, and we've received
+unambiguous feedback on the idea of Fedora using *anything* with the name
+"Enterprise Contract". Besides that, if we want to package our software for
+upstream distributions like Fedora, it's likely we'll have a hard time getting
+that name accepted.
+
+## What now?
+
+Coming up with a name is hard, but we got there. Conforma feels good. It's
+short, catchy, and has some solid connotations related to the functionality it
+provides, in my opinion at least!
+
+Rather than just rename our GitHub org and then the Git repos inside it, we're
+proceeding carefully to avoid disrupting any of the existing webhooks, CI
+triggers, etc. The name "Enterprise Contract" might not go away entirely, but
+we'll remove it from all the upstream resources, including the website and the
+documentation. Thanks for your patience while we make that happen.
+
+One more note: This may change in the future, but in the short term we're
+sticking with the binary name for the cli. If it helps, and I think it does,
+"ec" now stands for "execute conforma".
+
+{{< rawhtml >}}
+<video width="640" height="360" controls autoplay>
+  <source src="/images/newname.webm" type="video/webm">
+  Your browser does not support the video tag.
+</video>
+{{< /rawhtml >}}

website/layouts/shortcodes/conforma-name-preamble.html

@@ -15,8 +15,8 @@
         </td>
         <td class="content">
           This blog post refers to Conforma by its original name, "Enterprise Contract".
-          But don't worry! The only thing we've changed is the name. The examples described
-          here should work exactly the same.
+          But don't worry! The only thing we've changed is the name. The examples in this
+          article should continue to work exactly as described.
         </td>
       </tr>
     </tbody>