Autodesk product naming poll

[Ken Lord]

... And please do check out the comments.

So far I seem to be the most adamently against Autodesk taking the
MapServer name ... and I think I give some good reasons.

To restate what I said in my poll comment, I have already seen a few
potential clients confused over the MapServer / Autodesk issue that
could easily work to Autodesk's favour ... and I don't actually spend
much time building mapserver websites, I'm sure the hard core
developers have seen more of this than me.

I also don't appreciate the misleading messages I've seen in the media
regarding Autodesk open sourcing MapServer as if it were their's to
open source.  My less open source aware friends have been giving
Autodesk a lot of undeserved credit because of this lately.

This may not be directly Autodesk's fault (unless they have let the
media go uncorrected with their misleading articles), but I can add to
this that a coworker attended the recent Autodesk conference in
Orlando where the big announcement was made and he came back with some
very different ideas on what the origins of MapServer actually was.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Autodesk, I spend most of my working
hours using Autodesk products, and without these products I'm not sure
what I would have been doing in the last 5 years.

But they need to be kept under control.  Want another example on a
different topic?

... At that same conference, my coworker was shocked to find that
sensitive data from one of our clients was being used as lesson
material in a short-course, without our permission, without even
removing his name or our company's logo from the map.  This was data
sent in confidence to Autodesk to help us overcome an issue with using
the software.   The sad thing is that the solution they demonstrated
in the course never was sent to us to fix our problem.  Hopefully no
one else recognized the data, it was for a very important client to us
whom we do not want to loose.

Don't let the Gorilla step on us ... It's welcome in the zoo, but not
in the same cage.

Happy Holidays,
Ken Lord
Vancouver BC







On 12/21/05, Tyler Mitchell <tylermitchell at shaw.ca> wrote:
> At Gary's request, I've posted another poll to the MapServer website to help capture how the community feels about the naming of Autodesk's web mapping product.
>
> Please take the time to login and answer this poll:
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/community/polls/autodesk_name/
>
> Tyler
>