Andrew C. Oliver wrote:

Actually - I think you *are* wrong.

:-)

Reason is that this really should not be taking about Tomcat (because Tomcat is a community, not a product - silly people like me figure that out when they download the latest and greatest stable version and discover later that Tomcat != product, instead Tomcat == directory-of-spec-implementations - umm, let me go back and what version I have - a.k.a. product confusion).

What this discussion should be about is a framework we are obliged to live with because this is this "brand" management thing - not a discussion on a particular flame. At the end of the day - getting a bunch of committers to get their heads together on brand is a painful experience - UNLESS - you provide incentives to maintain a brand. How do you do that? You create a downside that is sufficiently unattractive that people have to work together to sort things out. The downside of forcing re-branding is a significant downside. Its just like forking - but heavier - forking just means that you have to work your but off to build the community, but re-branding means investing a lot more time in brand recognition and brand loyalty - and loosing a lot more relative to what exists in terms of public perception. People actually do think about the downsides of possible actions before taking particular actions. These downsides are weighed against the overhead of solving a problem though collaboration and other positive good sounding stuff that we like to talk about. So before you tell me off - keep in mind that up-sides and downsides provide real people with a sense of perspective. Without perspective, well, you just don't get the depth.

;-)

Cheers, Steve.

--

Stephen J. McConnell

OSM SARL digital products for a global economy mailto:mcco...@osm.net http://www.osm.net