[Mageia-dev] Art, Logo and Branding

[Tux99]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, [UTF-8] Marc Paré wrote:

> Le 2010-09-23 17:58, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Le jeudi 23 septembre 2010 à 16:17 -0400, Marc Paré a écrit :
>> 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.