A little while ago we made the decision here at OSTraining.com to alter how our name is shown to visitors.

We changed "Open Source Training" to "OSTraining" throughout our site. The main reason? In our user testing and customer interactions we constantly found that people were confused about the phrase "Open Source". We kept on hearing comments like these:

"I was under the impression that Open Source training meant I wouldn't have to pay for it. I won't be coming back."

"It's disgusting that you guys charge for Open Source training. You're making money off the hard work of all those volunteers."

That left us with two options:

Engage with each customer who raises this issue and talk them around. Remove the initial point of confusion and then teach them more about open source and its commercial aspects only after they've become a member.

We went with option 2. We realised that visitors need to know that we're great trainers first and foremost. The fact that we work with open source can wait.

The thing is, we're not alone in this. I went to look at the websites for a lot of big Open Source companies and nearly all of them mention "open source" far less than they once did. I picked five companies as examples. Here are some screenshots from archive.org compared with the 2012 version of their sites: