Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the Foundation

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:22:31 -0800

If the foundation was incorporated, then there must be articles of incorporation (or a similar legal document) and bylaws. And there is probably a 501c3 application in the works. 

Are those available for viewing?

        Allan

On Nov 29, 2005, at 17:56, Gary Lang wrote:


Allan,

A couple of points.

1) The main difference here may be that OpenMap started life as a
government-sponsored open source project, not a commercial project by a 
public software company. You are probably correct in saying that our
lawyers are careful.

2) The foundation was created two weeks ago, and is incorporated in
Delaware.

We thought, and I'm sure if folks think we made a mistake they'll tell
us, that announcing this and having no code available for download would 
raise lots of criticism. Instead we are getting all kinds of people
downloading and playing with the software, even though the official
download site won't go up until January.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 
Behalf Of Allan Doyle
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

...

OpenMap was released by a subsidiary of a public company (BBN, part
of GTE at the time) and was and is still maintained by developers at
BBN (now a private company again). I think there are gray areas that
are open to interpretation by the company lawyers. If the company's
lawyers are geared up for secrecy/non-disclosure, then that's the
kind of response you will get from them in every circumstance.

There are probably many instances of corporate-hosted open source out
there.

However, your answer was a non-sequitor. The statement was that
Autodesk need not have put the order as 1a. release code, 1b.
announce foundation where both happened at once. The order could have
been 1. announce foundation, 2. release code later.

In fact, the foundation does not yet exist from what I can tell by
reading the materials released so far. In order to form a 501c3, you
have to first incorporate a non-profit in a given state, then apply
to the IRS for status as a public charity. That takes time. At best,
it would take a month to get the corporation set up, and another
month (but more like 6 months) to get the public charity status.

So, in fact, the order legally is 1. release code to a web site whose
domain name is owned by Gary Lang, private citizen (and which has
three IP addresses in New York and Switzerland), and 2. gear up to
form the legal entity that's a foundation.

But I don't think it makes sense to quibble over details. It makes
sense to discuss the broader effect and how to best deal with it.
Always go for the high-order bit. The rest is just noise (at least
until you dealt with the big stuff).

        Allan





Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed McNierney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:57 PM
To: Gary Lang; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Gary -

Having been a CTO and VP of Marketing for more than one public
software
company, I respectfully disagree.  You are now, after all,
brainstorming
and asking questions on a public mailing list without benefit of an
NDA.
Not every action taken by a public company is a material event that
impacts its stock price, and public companies have all kinds of people 
saying all kinds of things all over the place without NDAs.  If
Autodesk
is a voting member of the Foundation, will you again expect another
NDA
every time you have a discussion that might affect the "MapServer
Enterprise" product?

The only reason you needed to disclose any Autodesk code was
because the
inclusion of that code in the MapServer Foundation was a
precondition of
your support.  It was certainly possible for Autodesk to support a
MapServer Foundation and THEN - after the Foundation was constituted - 
propose the contribution of that code to the Foundation.  The
Foundation
management could have authorized a technical subcommittee to sign
an NDA
with Autodesk in order to evaluate that proposed contribution.

You're confusing Autodesk's MapGuide product with the MapServer
Foundation, and that's the primary source of the problem.  The
MapServer
community needs a foundation dedicated to the stewardship of
MapServer,
and Autodesk is looking for a product and marketing strategy for its
MapGuide product.  Those are both fine goals, but they're completely
different goals.  I think Autodesk's behavior has been perfectly
reasonable for a commercial software company trying to design a path
forward for one of its products.  It is the endorsement and
acquiescence
to that strategy by a subset of the MapServer community - in the
absence
of an effort to investigate alternatives - that I object to.

        - Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(978) 251-4242

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Lang [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 4:34 PM
To: Ed McNierney; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Sure. It's pretty straightforward.

We are a public company. We make money from MapGuide. We weren't sure
what we were going to do and had questions to answer:

1) open source or not
2) can we work with the MS community or not and to see if our code was 
interesting enough to it to work with them on it
3)

A public company cannot brainstorm or ask questions like this on a
public mailing list. We also could not just show our code without an
NDA. It's simply not legally allowed. So our choice was:

1) go it alone, and effectively compete with MS from day one of our
announcements which would then have said "use MapGuide, not
MapServer",
don't consult with anyone, etc. That wasn't appealing after we met
with
Frank, Daniel, Paul, Dave and I talked to Steve.

2) try to explore, through the only means of exploration available to
us, what we could do by working with the community. The means
available
to us were NDAs to disclose the code and brainstorm on the idea of
working together.

The Apache guys had a similar situation when approach by IBM. It
worked
out well for Apache and IBM, and our goal is for this to work out well 
for the current MapServer and Autodesk as well.

This wasn't about control. It is more a lack of control - we were not
legally allowed to approach the exploration in any other way. Now that 
there is a legal foundation and it has the code and the code's out
there, we can talk. It's that simple.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed McNierney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:21 PM
To: Gary Lang; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Gary -

"Involving other companies is actually something I have been clear I
wanted to do from the outset"
"we'd be incredibly stupid to help establish a foundation in which
Autodesk or any other corporate entity has "control""

Can you explain, then, why Autodesk insisted that everyone
participating
in this process sign non-disclosure agreements with Autodesk?  That
process seems designed to ensure that Autodesk had control, and
prevented the involvement of other companies.

        - Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(978) 251-4242

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Gary Lang
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:45 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Hi Gary,

Gary from Autodesk here.

I am doing this as we speak. In fact I started making my first calls
about 2 weeks ago. I just got a call from one 2 minutes ago from
someone
at one those companies and they are interested in discussing what it
would mean to join.

Involving other companies is actually something I have been clear I
wanted to do from the outset. Since I'm good acquaintances with my
peers
at most of those companies and had hinted at our open source
intentions
before with some of them, I am hopeful they will join us in this
adventure based on initial interest.
Now, let me ask people here something, in my mind, if someone wants to 
join the foundation, they should contribute something to the
foundation
or agree to either support or use MapServer in their products, though. 
What do you think? And to be clear, I wouldn't care which code base
they
wanted to use.

I will address your comments about foundation control in another
email.
Suffice it to say that we'd be incredibly stupid to help establish a
foundation in which Autodesk or any other corporate entity has
"control"
- who would want to contribute their work if we did that? We wouldn't. 

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Gary Watry
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 11:30 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] epiphany about the idea of the
Foundation

Being as this is a non-profit open source Foundation, I hope that we
will ask the other commercial Internet map software companies to join
the Foundation in the same manner as AutoDesk.

This should include ESRI, Integraph, Microstation, MapInfo,
DeLorme, etc
etc

Anyone who has a vested interest in Internet Mapping should be
asked to
contribute and participate. If they opt not to - fine - but then they
are on record for choosing not to play

But then the contributors could insure their other products were
compatible with MapServer(OS) and that it was compatible with their
products.

The two fold benefit to this is
1. the foundation will not be concieved as a partner to Autodesk 2.
Autodesk or no other Commercial company will control the Foundation

______________________________________________________________
Gary L. Watry

GIS Coordinator
Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies FSU / COAPS Johnson
Building, RM 215
2035 East Paul Dirac Drive
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2840

E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Lester Caine
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] current OS license

Charlton Purvis wrote:


Hi, folks:

Although there continues to be an open source spirit surrounding the

code
amid the launch of a MS Foundation, I'd like to ask for clarification 
re.

the license of the MS code as it stands now.

If for whatever reason a company like Autodesk (or I guess it would

have
to

be the Foundation) wanted to slap some kind of non-open source
license

on

the code, is it true that the current code we call MapServer in its

current

state will always remain covered under the license below?  Basically

I'm

trying to make sure that a shop can't somehow repossess something
that

was

originally OS thus preventing folks from using it like it's being
used

now.

Borland tried it with Interbase, but Firebird is now freely available
and there is not a lot Borland can now do about it ;) I am sure
Autocad
have a 'hidden agenda' but as long as there are free versions of what
ever is needed to provide a working system then there will not be a
problem. Anything commercial will have to be worth the money to
make any
sales :)

p.s. I am not seeing my posts to the list so if you get this Charlton
and it's not on the list please can you forward it :(

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.



--
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




--
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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