MapTools & Foundation

[Paul Ramsey]

Lots of interesting ideas floating around, and good suggestions for  
moving forward.  I will weigh in with my suggestions, which you can  
take as much salt as you need to make palatable:

*** Foundation Name ***

   Mapserver may be the first open source project in the door here,  
but painting its name in big letters over the lintel will discourage  
others from joining.  I think that the Apache example is actually a  
*bad* one to follow, since I personally found their naming system  
fairly confusing for quite a while ("This is apache? I thought it was  
a web server? So is this supposed to integrate with the web server?").

   Many good suggestions on a neutral foundation name have floated  
by, but my favourite is and remains "Maptools Foundation" using  
maptools.org as a site.  For most people, the only obvious  
connections of maptools.org with DM Solutions is the graphical  
look'n'feel on the web site, and that is easily enough stripped away  
and made neutral.  "Maptools" is short, practical sounding, it is not  
buzz wordy, geospatial-this-and-that, and using it amalgamates a good  
central site into the foundation right away.

*** Product Names ***

   As many others have said, let "Mapserver" be "Mapserver".  Let the  
product-formerly-known-as-mapguide be something else.  You are not  
telling them how to name their product, you are just telling them  
that they cannot directly appropriate the Mapserver name.  I imagine  
they would feel the same way if we wanted to start calling Mapserver  
"MapGuide Enterprise".

   This will be no fun for DM or Autodesk, since it involves walking  
back a bunch of announcements, but perhaps that is the price of  
rushing out the door so quickly.  From what I have read of the  
comments, the naming issue is the central one, since little else has  
been decided, and it would certainly make the community as a whole  
less restive (I hope).

*** Governance ***

   It is great that governance will be discussed in the open, and  
that Frank is already putting together some straw men for us to burn  
(wooo, burning man!).  I fear that consensus will be practically  
impossible to achieve, and a command decision will have to be made.   
At the end of the day, I suppose the only decision making agents are  
UMN and Autodesk, since they are the ones actually donating code to  
the organization that will be run by the governance model.  If they  
decline to donate their code, governance becomes a moot point.   
However, any governance model should be appealing enough that other  
future organizations will feel interested in donating code.  Which  
leads to...

*** PostGIS and uDig ***

   Just to pre-empt some questions, we have no plans to move PostGIS  
or uDig into the Foundation in the near or middle term.  We really  
would have to see the Foundation succeeding and as a big boost over  
our current structure in terms of business development in order to  
move our large projects there, and that will take quite some time --  
there needs to be a solid business case to do so.  There are some  
other smaller projects (IMSEMU) which we will be interested in  
bringing into the Foundation once things solidify a bit.

Paul