Gary Lang wrote:
OK. So here's a sincere call for input.
Here's the rub. Regardless of who made the mistake of suggesting it, I
liked the name and agreed that we would go with it, so I'll take
responsibility for MSE.
On the back of that, we - what can now be seen as the TSC-x cabal + 1
ADSK person - started drifting from foundation names that had more
umbrella-like characteristics like osgis.org, mapcommunity, maptools,
etc. and towards something that focuses on what we were putting out
together. Based on the fact that both products were named MapServer in
the root, we went with "MapServer Foundation".
Now let's assume we change the name back to MapGuide. Why would I now
want to cripple any hope of adoption by anybody by putting it in a
foundation (that I helped name) that highlights one map serving product
over another?
I think you've described for yourself the fundamental flaw of the recent
happenings. You say that "both products were named MapServer" and
that's why you chose "MapServer foundation" when in fact, there was only
one MapServer, the other is MapGuide. To me, if you want MapServer to
be the dominant project, you call the foundation "MapServer foundation",
if you want the projects to be treated as equals, you don't name the
foundation after one of the products, you name it something else (open
source mapping foundation, for example). Another thing to be considered
is that the foundation name becomes a defacto brand name and the product
name should stand on its own without the foundation name (I used an
example earlier of "Apache Tomcat" and just "Tomcat"). "Enterprise"
isn't a product name, it's a qualifier. If you would have called it
"MapServer MapGuide" you probably wouldn't have gotten much static at
all about it at all. Everybody would understand that they were two
seperate products, which is the biggest problem.
--
Jeff Hoffmann
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
