rbo...@rcbowen.com wrote on 10/12/23 2:29 PM:
On Thu, 2023-10-12 at 10:58 -0400, David Smiley wrote:
Thanks Richard. I'll take your response as a Director as overriding
whatever confusion I have with the published rules. I was hoping
your
perspective would somehow be evident in ASF published rules so that I
wouldn't have needed to ask on ComDev. Alas.
Just to be clear: Directors don't set trademark policy, the VP of Brand
Management does. So any major concerns should absolutely go to the
privately archived trademarks@ list:
https://apache.org/foundation/marks/contact#pmc
In terms of proper usage and high-level processes around trademarks, the
purpose of our brand policies are to ensure the ASF and our projects
accrue the goodwill behind our marks. Since we primarily produce
software, the key question is: will new attendees to some event (like
you mention) believe the underlying software comes from the ASF or not?
In terms of BOFs at our own events, the association to ASF projects
should be clear, and should only need the organizational approval of the
event organizers. In particular, attendees at the BOF are already going
to be well aware of ASF branding elsewhere.
Even in terms of BOFs at non-ASF affiliated events, I would not normally
expect organizers to need PMC approval up front. In particular, BOFs
are often arranged at a conference during the hallway track. Similarly,
attendees at a technical event like Berlin Buzzwords are unlikely to be
confused about brands, unless whoever's holding the BOF is otherwise
improperly using our trademarks.
I think that, as with many ASF policies, policies are created to
address bad situations, rather than pre-emptively. This has never come
up that I'm aware of, and thus our policy never thought to address it.
So, yeah, we could stand to update that policy to reflect this
feedback. But FWIW, that's *my* policy, as VP Conferences, so whatever
confusion you have with it is *also* on me.
It sounds like simple clarifications would help:
- Add a brief note about BOFs or other small scheduled parts of a larger
branded event to the marks/events policy, and point to the comdev page.
- Update the ComDev small-events page to more clearly separate kinds of
events, and better point to major points of the trademark policy.
- Update the ComDev small-events page to better reflect that the PMC may
be able to help on a volunteer basis.
- Ensure events.apache.org, which should be the conceptual homepage for
many of these questions, to clarify and better point to the other pages.
Does that make sense?
--
- Shane
ComDev PMC
The Apache Software Foundation
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