On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Sanjiva Weerawarana <[email protected]> wrote:
> Noah I answered the same question by the same person (Joe) during the
> incubator discussion.
>
> You have my (personal) word we will run our proposed branding by the ASF
> branding team before we go out with it. To be honest, we have not even
> thought of how we'd do it ... we're a very different kind of company :-).
> We'll sort it out when we get there ..
>
> I wasn't trying to imply its a a fait accompli - just that I don't see the
> point of a discussion being repeated when the same committers voted for the
> current position 2 weeks ago.
>
> Sanjiva.
>
Sanjiva,
I think that your missing the context of Joe's position, so a bit of history.
CloudStack was an established brand from Cloud.com and later Citrix
that came to the ASF, much like Stratos. By all accounts from the
trademark folks, Citrix has done this relatively cleanly, and behaved
well. I suspect, particularly with the level of commitment we'ven seen
from WSO2, that this will also be the case and that there will be no
bad behavior. If that were the only concern, we wouldn't have a
conversation.
Joe's particular pain points were not so much from what Citrix did,
but from the public linking the CloudStack brand to Citrix, and thus
linking actions and statements to Citrix, and continuing, despite lots
of reeducation efforts to link the two. In full disclosure - Joe and I
both are Citrix employees, and while we think our employer did a
decent job in behaving well from a trademark perspective, that isn't
the only piece of the puzzle.
I'll give one example of such a problem: At a OSS event in India,
CloudStack had a booth manned by committers from the project. Separate
from that, Citrix sponsored the event and had a listing as a sponsor
(much like it does at the ASF). One of the organizers of that
conference who didn't catch the nuance of the problem, took it upon
himself to chang the logo on the website and combined the Citrix and
CloudStack logos so that 'Citrix CloudStack' was listed as one of the
Gold sponsors. This was noticed by folks external to the project and a
small but serious firestorm erupted, alleging that:
1. Citrix was abusing the ASF, and the project and making it a vehicle
to advertise their product.
2. Apache CloudStack wasn't an independent project, and that Citrix
was controlling it.
Of course to make it worse, no one in the project knew who in Citrix
sponsored the event, or where the munged logo came from, but
regardless, the damage was done, and even though it was rectified
within 12 hours, for some segment of the public, that became one of
their perceptions of the project. This isn't only such incident in
which people confused Citrix as the mouthpiece for CloudStack, but is
a decent example.
So please don't take this as a 'we dont trust {you, WSO2}' - take this
as a 'we just came through a very similar process, and remember the
bruises'. And for the record, at the start of our project, I advocated
for keeping the CloudStack name, and if I had it to do over, I still
am 50/50 on whether to do so - there are advantages to keeping the
name and availing yourself of the branding investment made by WSO2.
There are also some potential downsides, and it's worth at least
having the community considering so they are making an informed
decision, not just the default.
--David
