epiphany about the idea of the Foundation

Tue Nov 29 13:57:27 PST 2005

Gary -

Having been a CTO and VP of Marketing for more than one public software
company, I respectfully disagree.  You are now, after all, brainstorming
and asking questions on a public mailing list without benefit of an NDA.
Not every action taken by a public company is a material event that
impacts its stock price, and public companies have all kinds of people
saying all kinds of things all over the place without NDAs.  If Autodesk
is a voting member of the Foundation, will you again expect another NDA
every time you have a discussion that might affect the "MapServer
Enterprise" product?

The only reason you needed to disclose any Autodesk code was because the
inclusion of that code in the MapServer Foundation was a precondition of
your support.  It was certainly possible for Autodesk to support a
MapServer Foundation and THEN - after the Foundation was constituted -
propose the contribution of that code to the Foundation.  The Foundation
management could have authorized a technical subcommittee to sign an NDA
with Autodesk in order to evaluate that proposed contribution.

You're confusing Autodesk's MapGuide product with the MapServer
Foundation, and that's the primary source of the problem.  The MapServer
community needs a foundation dedicated to the stewardship of MapServer,
and Autodesk is looking for a product and marketing strategy for its
MapGuide product.  Those are both fine goals, but they're completely
different goals.  I think Autodesk's behavior has been perfectly
reasonable for a commercial software company trying to design a path
forward for one of its products.  It is the endorsement and acquiescence
to that strategy by a subset of the MapServer community - in the absence
of an effort to investigate alternatives - that I object to.

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Lang [mailto:gary.lang at autodesk.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 4:34 PM
To: Ed McNierney; MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Sure. It's pretty straightforward. 

We are a public company. We make money from MapGuide. We weren't sure
what we were going to do and had questions to answer:

1) open source or not
2) can we work with the MS community or not and to see if our code was
interesting enough to it to work with them on it
3) 

A public company cannot brainstorm or ask questions like this on a
public mailing list. We also could not just show our code without an
NDA. It's simply not legally allowed. So our choice was:

1) go it alone, and effectively compete with MS from day one of our
announcements which would then have said "use MapGuide, not MapServer",
don't consult with anyone, etc. That wasn't appealing after we met with
Frank, Daniel, Paul, Dave and I talked to Steve.

2) try to explore, through the only means of exploration available to
us, what we could do by working with the community. The means available
to us were NDAs to disclose the code and brainstorm on the idea of
working together. 

The Apache guys had a similar situation when approach by IBM. It worked
out well for Apache and IBM, and our goal is for this to work out well
for the current MapServer and Autodesk as well.

This wasn't about control. It is more a lack of control - we were not
legally allowed to approach the exploration in any other way. Now that
there is a legal foundation and it has the code and the code's out
there, we can talk. It's that simple.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed McNierney [mailto:ed at topozone.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:21 PM
To: Gary Lang; MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Gary -

"Involving other companies is actually something I have been clear I
wanted to do from the outset"
"we'd be incredibly stupid to help establish a foundation in which
Autodesk or any other corporate entity has "control""

Can you explain, then, why Autodesk insisted that everyone participating
in this process sign non-disclosure agreements with Autodesk?  That
process seems designed to ensure that Autodesk had control, and
prevented the involvement of other companies.

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242 

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Gary Lang
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:45 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Hi Gary,

Gary from Autodesk here.

I am doing this as we speak. In fact I started making my first calls
about 2 weeks ago. I just got a call from one 2 minutes ago from someone
at one those companies and they are interested in discussing what it
would mean to join. 

Involving other companies is actually something I have been clear I
wanted to do from the outset. Since I'm good acquaintances with my peers
at most of those companies and had hinted at our open source intentions
before with some of them, I am hopeful they will join us in this
adventure based on initial interest. 

Now, let me ask people here something, in my mind, if someone wants to
join the foundation, they should contribute something to the foundation
or agree to either support or use MapServer in their products, though.
What do you think? And to be clear, I wouldn't care which code base they
wanted to use.

I will address your comments about foundation control in another email.
Suffice it to say that we'd be incredibly stupid to help establish a
foundation in which Autodesk or any other corporate entity has "control"
- who would want to contribute their work if we did that? We wouldn't. 

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Gary Watry
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 11:30 AM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the Foundation

Being as this is a non-profit open source Foundation, I hope that we
will ask the other commercial Internet map software companies to join
the Foundation in the same manner as AutoDesk.

This should include ESRI, Integraph, Microstation, MapInfo, DeLorme, etc
etc

Anyone who has a vested interest in Internet Mapping should be asked to
contribute and participate. If they opt not to - fine - but then they
are on record for choosing not to play

But then the contributors could insure their other products were
compatible with MapServer(OS) and that it was compatible with their
products.

The two fold benefit to this is
1. the foundation will not be concieved as a partner to Autodesk 2.
Autodesk or no other Commercial company will control the Foundation

______________________________________________________________
Gary L. Watry

GIS Coordinator
Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies FSU / COAPS Johnson
Building, RM 215
2035 East Paul Dirac Drive
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2840

E-Mail: watry at coaps.fsu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Lester Caine
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:06 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] current OS license

Charlton Purvis wrote:

> Hi, folks:
> 
> Although there continues to be an open source spirit surrounding the
code
> amid the launch of a MS Foundation, I'd like to ask for clarification
re.
> the license of the MS code as it stands now.
> 
> If for whatever reason a company like Autodesk (or I guess it would
have
to
> be the Foundation) wanted to slap some kind of non-open source license
on
> the code, is it true that the current code we call MapServer in its
current
> state will always remain covered under the license below?  Basically
I'm
> trying to make sure that a shop can't somehow repossess something that
was
> originally OS thus preventing folks from using it like it's being used
now.

Borland tried it with Interbase, but Firebird is now freely available
and there is not a lot Borland can now do about it ;) I am sure Autocad
have a 'hidden agenda' but as long as there are free versions of what
ever is needed to provide a working system then there will not be a
problem. Anything commercial will have to be worth the money to make any
sales :)

p.s. I am not seeing my posts to the list so if you get this Charlton
and it's not on the list please can you forward it :(

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.