Mortar site about pages

[tedivm]

Tomorrow (or tomorrow night) I'll work on fleshing out the "about" section of the site. I worked out some bullet points on those pages and would like your inputs.

Features

I want to divide this up into sections for Designers, Developers, Managers/Site Admins and Users. This is one section I'm really hoping for help on with the layout, because I feel a standard blob of text won't do it.

History

I'm going to get all nostalgic here and talk about some of the earlier failed ideas (Galaxia in college, Zarrs, Simplemod, BentoBase, etc- but probably not all by name) and why I wanted to build this. Once I get a history from my perspective I'd like to pull in history from your perspectives as well.

License

Since we're going straight out MPL we're going to have to justify it a bit. I'm going to talk about how freedom means the freedom to let people do things you may not like, such as building proprietary modules. I'm then doing to reassure people that the project is its own project, there is no "community" and "paid" version, that whats why we're using the MPL. 

I also want to hit on our logo and name usage rights. I want to avoid being overbearing about things- in fact I may even make jokes about it (in a subtle, tasteful way)- but I do want to make sure people don't make claims to have official anything, use "Mortar" in their module or library names, or base their logos directly off ours in a way that implies endorsement. They will have fair use rights, and I'd like to give them even more than that as any time our name is out there other people see it and thats good, but at all times we have to make sure no one implies endorsement that we didn't give.

Third Party

I want to gain the good will of other projects and advertise our use of them. If we're lucky some will do the same (I know jshrink will!).

Goals

Here are what I consider to be our three goals. This is very much open to debate but I want to keep our focus on this. Remember that modules can have their own unique goals, these are just the goals for mortar core.

* Cross Compatibility (themes and modules)

* Performance

* Flexibility

Contact

Link to mailing lists, irc and google issues tracking.

Robert

[tedivm]

Oh, I should probably link to stuff-

http://builtwithmortar.org/index.html

Still very much under construction (mostly the content).

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[Joshua Hall-Bachner]

I'll have more detailed thoughts on all of this shortly but I wanted to first fire something off to say that everything you lay out here sounds great. I'm thinking about how to handle the layout of the Features section now and I'll be sure to weigh in once I've got something gelled.

Logo and name usage rights is an interesting issue. I think drupal pretty clearly demonstrates the dangers of an overbearing or simply factually unsupportable trademark policy. Have we put anything like this into writing before and if not, do we have any references for another project that handles the issue in what seems like a good way?

-- josh

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Joshua Hall-Bachner
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[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I also want to hit on our logo and name usage rights. I want to avoid being overbearing about things- in fact I may even make jokes about it (in a subtle, tasteful way)- but I do want to make sure people don't make claims to have official anything, use "Mortar" in their module or library names, or base their logos directly off ours in a way that implies endorsement. They will have fair use rights, and I'd like to give them even more than that as any time our name is out there other people see it and thats good, but at all times we have to make sure no one implies endorsement that we didn't give.

The way we ensure control over the logo and name is by trademarking them. That's how movie ratings, California Organic certification, and that hideous Apache logo work.

A simple ™ will do until we have the money to do an ®.

I want to divide this up into sections for Designers, Developers, Managers/Site Admins and Users. This is one section I'm really hoping for help on with the layout, because I feel a standard blob of text won't do it.

Yeah. Each is going to care about something different. I can't say what attracts a developer or site admin. Site managers want to know about accessing their content, so that should be all demos about how you do stuff.

Designers will need to see some tools and be reassured of a) standards adhesion and b) fault tolerance. We'll want to see clear demos of how to make a theme.

A quickie thing about the site, which I haven't had a chance to read yet: the headers should be Vegur, not VegurLight. The Light version doesn't yield any texture.

-J

Joshua Newman Design

401.225.7222

[tedivm]

Ultimately we're going to create a foundation and put the copyright and trademarks under that. Lisa is working on that bit. Obviously we'll have to work out the organization rules and such too.

Robert

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I'd suggest that, until there's a foundation, you hold the trademark yourself, or Lisa does, or something. Threatening that we'll be crankypants about it doesn't really have much impact if someone decides to use it against our wishes.

You can transfer the ownership of a ™ by doing exactly nothing, though I'm sure there are costs associated with transferring a ®, so just keep it ™ for now, until the foundation is set up.

I'll add ™s to the logo. I always forget to do that, and I should really cut that shit out.

-J

[Joshua Hall-Bachner]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 7:39 PM, Joshua A.C. Newman <jos...@joshuanewmandesign.com> wrote:

A quickie thing about the site, which I haven't had a chance to read yet: the headers should be Vegur, not VegurLight. The Light version doesn't yield any texture.

Good call. I'll make the change on that. If you have any other comments on the theme we're using there I welcome them with open arms -- I think there's a solid base there but it could really use a critical eye for that last 5% to take it from solid to... something better than solid.

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Joshua Hall-Bachner
charl...@gmail.com