Le 2010-09-23 17:58, Michael Scherer a écrit :
Le jeudi 23 septembre 2010 à 16:17 -0400, Marc Paré a écrit :
I think in the grand scheme of things, we should all acknowledge that
should the name "Mageia" not work, that a name change would be a
possibility, just as a logo change is still a possibility. We have seen
this from many OSS firms who went through this process.
How do you assess that it is the name that do not work and that's not
anything else ?
We should be careful in making the distro too "cottagey" or "home grown"
in looks and flavour. I would suggest that the long term vision for the
distro also include a commercial aspect. There should be a community
driven distro and a commercial distro (read server).
I fear that this scheme does look like too much the one that caused
problem in the past within Mandriva community, with contradictions
between the community nature and the more commercial version.
How would you ensure that the community version will not be seen as a
cheap version of the commercial one ? How would you prevent this idea
from destroying again the community like it did by the past ?
If theses questions are not solved, I think all attempts to redo the
mistakes of the past are bound to recreate the failures of the past.
And I think that none of us think that's a desirable outcome.
All people who I asked the question said that the only solution is to
have 2 different names and brandings.
Redhat do it, and it work fine from them.
Novell do it, and it work fine.
Canonical do it ( to a lesser extend , since there was
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375345 ), and it work
fine.
Even debian based distro used a different name ( progeny, etc ).
We didn't for Mandriva, and so started the confusion between the
company, the distribution and the community. And so people didn't
contribute because it was a business, and the idea that "updates were
not free" stick around for a long time because it was hard to explain to
people the different concept
So if there is a business or commercial version, I think this would
requires a different name and branding. Using the association name for
that would not be right, in my opinion.
Good points.
However, we are lucky in that are just at the start of organizing the
community and it gives us the luxury of trying to plan a rational growth
path for the distro.
Mageia is starting off from the community end of things. We should then
be looking at models where communities have grown from that end then. A
good example that I can think of is the Moodle application where it
started out as a community driven project and its commercial end is now
doing quite well. The planning for the commercial end came a little
after the Moodle community became popular and the commercial end
followed. Their logo and name are quite known now in educational
circles, both on the community OSS side and the corporate side. This
assures the community a little more financial independence with support
coming from the corporate side.
It may be to our benefit to see if some similar growth models could be
applied to Mageia.
Marc
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