On 8/5/06, Sanjiva Weerawarana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
IMO the reason this naming debate hasn't been settled is because of the way in which the change from Blaze to Glasgow was achieved: it was done privately and the result was announced here.
+1
I can imagine how frustrating this must be to folks who are new to Apache, but folks here don't like private stuff. If you come here you must be willing to open your kimono all the way, not just let us take a peek thru a small crack. An example was the Ajax proposal .. the name got rejected and we had a public debate here and created Kabuki (which of course proceeded to have a failure to launch but that's another movie).
+1
In any case, if there are naming issues we can certainly deal with them during incubation and simply make it a graduation criteria to come up with a better name. I can see why marketing types will get upset by that but again educating the marketing community to deal with the Apache Way is a requirement to survive here too :-). The PRC folks will take the sledge hammer on that one!
IMO good names for open source projects are very different from good names for commercial products. marketing types will talk about postive and negative associations. for open source projects, the more unique the name the better. it's better for everyone if downstream commercial vendors create their own good marketing names and leave us to pick something unique. as a not-for-profit, apache has different priorities. ethics is definitely important. as a gorilla, we should be careful to aviod throwing our weight around unfairly. legal considerations are also important. trademarks are a vital tool in enforcing key apache policies. without decent uniqueness, we lose some control. we also really want to avoid being sued for trademark enfringement. infringing a trademark would mean (at the very least) having to close the project. i think that danny's right that we need to do something about the problem of naming. it's causing too many unnecessary issues. as a first step, i'll try to find some time tomorrow to add some documentation about naming to the entry guide so at least folks understand that we are likely to be sensitive to this issue.
We're *such* a whacky bunch.
that's true enough :-) given the amount of upset caused by names, i think that we should appoint sanjiva as chief-name-wangler. his role would be to seek out remote parts of the world with languages as yet untouched by commercial name mining and come back with a harvest of great new names for apache projects ;-) - robert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
