Evaluate which are the implications of renaming License Management in License Compliance
License Management is the name we decided to release our feature that allows users to define policies on which licenses are allowed or forbidden in their projects.
This is great, but there could be some confusion with other means of the "license management" term, that could be referred to GitLab license handling for our subscriptions.
We had an analyst inquiry (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/general/issues/3223) and a UX research (ux-research#80 (closed)) that addressed this topic, and they both ended up with the conclusion that License Compliance could be a better name, even if License Management is not wrong at all.
Since the effort to rename a feature is not trivial, we should evaluate pros/cons of both solutions and define if we want to change the name (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/6365).
- Pros on using License Compliance name
- the name License Compliance (49%) is considered better than License Management (39%)
- it is listed in possible alternatives by analysts
- it fits well in our marketing messaging on "Security and Compliance", where we already use the compliance term
- Cons on using License Compliance name
- User-facing product code should be updated with the new name
- Backend/frontend code should include the new name along with the old one (e.g., CI/CD job names, API, JSON, reports)
- Documentation and marketing pages should be updated with the new name
What is hitting hard is Cons #2
, and it is not easy to justify given the good consensus with the current License Management name (39%).
This is a plan to rename the feature, in case we want to do that:
- support
license_compliance
job name in.gitlab-ci.yml
- support new reports named
license_compliance
- modify backend code to also support
license_compliance
in every place wherelicense_management
is currently used - modify frontend code to also support
license_compliance
in every place wherelicense_management
is currently used - modify frontend code to replace
License Compliance
in every place whereLicense Management
is currently used - update documentation to replace
License Compliance
in every place whereLicense Management
is currently used - update PMM material to replace
License Compliance
in every place whereLicense Management
is currently used
We should introduce all these changes in GitLab 12.0, and keep backward compatibility until GitLab 13.0, where we can eventually remove any support to License Management
.