[Mageia-dev] Art, Logo and Branding

Fri Sep 24 00:42:41 CEST 2010

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, [UTF-8] Marc ParÃ© wrote:
+
+> Le 2010-09-23 17:58, Michael Scherer a Ã©crit :
+> Le jeudi 23 septembre 2010 Ã  16:17 -0400, Marc ParÃ© a Ã©crit :
+>> I think in the grand scheme of things, we should all acknowledge that
+>> should the name "Mageia" not work, that a name change would be a
+>> possibility, just as a logo change is still a possibility. We have seen
+>> this from many OSS firms who went through this process.
+>
+> How do you assess that it is the name that do not work and that's not
+> anything else ?
+>
+>> We should be careful in making the distro too "cottagey" or "home grown"
+>> in looks and flavour. I would suggest that the long term vision for the
+>> distro also include a commercial aspect. There should be a community
+>> driven distro and a commercial distro (read server).
+>
+> I fear that this scheme does look like too much the one that caused
+> problem in the past within Mandriva community, with contradictions
+> between the community nature and the more commercial version.
+>
+> How would you ensure that the community version will not be seen as a
+> cheap version of the commercial one ? How would you prevent this idea
+> from destroying again the community like it did by the past ?
+>
+> If theses questions are not solved, I think all attempts to redo the
+> mistakes of the past are bound to recreate the failures of the past.
+> And I think that none of us think that's a desirable outcome.
+>
+> All people who I asked the question said that the only solution is to
+> have 2 different names and brandings.
+> Redhat do it, and it work fine from them.
+> Novell do it, and it work fine.
+> Canonical do it ( to a lesser extend , since there was
+> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375345 ), and it work
+> fine.
+>
+> Even debian based distro used a different name ( progeny, etc ).
+>
+> We didn't for Mandriva, and so started the confusion between the
+> company, the distribution and the community. And so people didn't
+> contribute because it was a business, and the idea that "updates were
+> not free" stick around for a long time because it was hard to explain to
+> people the different concept
+>
+> So if there is a business or commercial version, I think this would
+> requires a different name and branding. Using the association name for
+> that would not be right, in my opinion.
+>
+>
+> Good points.
+>
+> However, we are lucky in that are just at the start of organizing the 
+> community and it gives us the luxury of trying to plan a rational growth 
+> path for the distro.
+>
+> Mageia is starting off from the community end of things. We should then 
+> be looking at models where communities have grown from that end then. A 
+> good example that I can think of is the Moodle application where it 
+> started out as a community driven project and its commercial end is now 
+> doing quite well. The planning for the commercial end came a little 
+> after the Moodle community became popular and the commercial end 
+> followed. Their logo and name are quite known now in educational 
+> circles, both on the community OSS side and the corporate side. This 
+> assures the community a little more financial independence with 
+> support  coming from the corporate side.
+> 
+> It may be to our benefit to see if some similar growth models could be 
+> applied to Mageia.
+
+
+I 100% agree with Michael, Mageia the foundation and the distro should 
+NOT have any commercial involvement, that's not how it was intended as 
+far as I understand the objectives on the mageia.or home page and that's 
+definitely not what i want to be involved in.
+
+Of course anyone (including community members) is free to create a 
+separate for profit distro under a different name that is based on 
+Mageia, but the name Magei should NEVER be associated with a commercial 
+distro.
+
+Debian should be our only example to follow in this respect.
+
+