On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 10:41 PM, David Nalley <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks: > > So one of the things that PMCs are charged with is maintaining the > brand of a project[1][2], and while it's a responsibility of the PMC, > I brought the discussion here to enable some broader conversations and > to solicit input from folks in general. > > This discussion is not about the mascot - but rather the name and > logo. (or in trademark terms, the wordmark, logo, logotype) > > As a project we are provided tremendous flexibility in establishing > our brand - you'll even note some projects have completely changed > their name (Cordova nee CallBack, nee Phonegap). In this email I am > not going to share my opinion (I'll follow up with that in a bit), but > rather want to call for participation on this topic. Please weigh in. > > --David > > [1] http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#brand-policy > [1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/responsibility
Hi folks, I am back, this time with my opinion. I am breaking this up into two sections: 1. my stance 2. my reasoning Branding is an interesting thing to me, and I am biased wrt to this project, as I think I had a small part in promoting the existing CloudStack brand. #Stance My personal stance is that the name should be 'Apache CloudStack' . For the record, you can see the two different types of brand logos currently in use here: http://people.apache.org/~ke4qqq/runbook/ The main logo is center of the page - and says cloudstack in blue and gray with a ruled line and 'open source cloud computing' below it. The secondary logo is in the top left hand of the page above - and just has cloudstack in blue and gray. (best seen with firefox or chrome, I seem to recall IE not liking SVGs, but maybe that's a non-issue now). There's been some discussion of adding some Apache elements like the feather or the 'Apache' wordmark, and while I am thrilled to be at the ASF, I don't personally want to see us do this, and I'll discuss that below as well. #Justifications: * The 'Apache CloudStack' name shows both our lineage (CloudStack) and our (hopeful) future at the ASF - and it complies with the incubator guidelines to boot. * This logo is already widely in use, and all things considered is relatively well spread for an open source brand as nascent as it is. * This logo is already on thousands of items of swag from luggage tags to tshirts and everything in between * The current logo works well even in single color, which is economical should we desire to produce swag or use it in print. * I'd argue the current brand is pretty good, and changing it, especially if it's a drastic change is a decent amount of work to get done. * (Warning: Lazy side of me appearing) If there's nothing broken, we shouldn't expend the cycles on reinventing the brand which distracts us from the real objective of the project. ##Reasons for not adding Apache elements: * Some of the most successful ASF projects do not have either the wordmark in their logo or feather-logo. Namely Hadoop, Cassandra, etc. http://hadoop.apache.org/images/hadoop-logo.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/4561537432/ * The incubator frowns on projects with an undue fascination with the Apache brand.[1] * If it's the feather-log it becomes much more difficult to print ## Potential downsides There are some downsides - I realize that - and am even happy to point them out. 1. There was previously a commercial product (as well as the project) also known as CloudStack - and the producer of that product still has some folks that can't discern the difference between the ASF project and their product based on the ASF-project. (this is a training problem with individuals, not the body corporate IMO, but I am biased) 2. There's some striking similarity to another IaaS project, though FWIU the two names originated within a few months of each other. Your thoughts, comments, and flames are welcome --David [1] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html#template-brand-fascination
