[Mageia-dev] Art, Logo and Branding

[Remco Rijnders]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 06:29:35PM -0400, Marc Paré wrote:
> 
> 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 think there is a difference between Mageia selling DVD's, access to
dedicated download mirrors, t-shirts and coffee mugs in order to raise
some cash to support its operations and running a commercial distro that
aims to earn money by only offering the commercial deal.

It would be unwise IMHO to focus on getting Mageia as a commercial and
corporate entity. For one, the people who now have generously donated will
feel (rightly so I'd say) quite miffed at their donations being used to
make others a profit.

If this is what Mageia would want, then that should have been part of the
initial announcement. Uptake, enthusiasm and support would have been
different in that case though. Should anyone want to operate a Mageia
based commercial Linux venture, then that is of course for them to decide,
but Mageia or its board should not be influenced by this or profit
considerations.

Remco
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