On Wednesday 21 December 2005 22:22, Dave McIlhagga wrote: > I felt compelled to write back about this issue -- because I still feel > very strongly that there are many very good reasons for having a shared > 'MapServer' name with this new web mapping technology.
A few notes on this. It's been over a month since the launch of the Foundation and the (in)voluntary name change. While it really comes in handy to leverage the Autodesk name when big names try to diss solutions based on mapserver, I've had problems with exactly that common part. It happens that from the several clients and persons involved in GIS projects I talked to regarding the role of Foundation and the (re)naming, not a SINGLE one of them got it right on their own. That was scary considering the near future of MapServer. I really don't want to FUD this but there were REALLY weird inceptions about what had happened a month ago in mapserver land. Some even thought Autodesk made a 'real' free web mapping solution for which they hired the original MapServer developers (since they saw the MS folks list at the Foundation site), who in turn gave up their 'lesser' product - guess which. Others outright asked when will we upgrade to the now freely available Enterprise version thinking what we used so far (the real MapServer) was a somehow crippled free version of the same for which Autodesk was so far afraid to associate with. All in all MASSIVE amounts of confusion I'm not sure I managed to dissolve in all heads and something I think no business wanted or was prepared to. And the root cause was exactly that common naming (not the existance of a Foundation or Autodesk per se), so one month later I'm less and less 'thrilled' about it, especially considering the aforementioned future of the MapServer we all knew and used. What does all this mean ? Nothing, really, these are only some of my personal experiences on this topic. Why am I writing this ? I'm hoping extra feedback will help the quick coder-to-product manager transition many of the excellent MapServer core contributors are taking now and makes them at least equally good open source project managers for the benefit of the MapServer community in the widest possible sense. Don't forget - the community is not code nor a country, so it should not be run as one, either.
