Autodesk product naming poll

[Attila Csipa]

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.