On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Shane Curcuru <a...@shanecurcuru.org> wrote: > On 8/16/15 4:25 PM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Shane Curcuru <a...@shanecurcuru.org> wrote: >>> On 8/7/15 7:53 AM, Niclas Hedhman wrote: >>>> Bill, >>>> So I can release "Niclas Hadoop platform, based on Apache Hadoop" ?? I >>>> thought the discussion a few years ago was that this was misleading... >>> >>> No, you cannot. See our actual trademark policy: >>> >>> https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/#products >>> >>> Our release policy, as Roman originally asked about, applies only to ASF >>> projects, and has no bearing on third parties. However our trademark >>> policy, and trademark law, prevents third parties from publicly >>> providing software using our trademarks. >>> >>> Our operational policies only apply to our projects, just like any other >>> corporation. Some policies, like our license itself and our formal >>> trademark policy, inform the rest of the world how they are allowed to >>> use our websites, software code, and brands. >>> >>> Make sense? >> >> It does, but our relationships with downstream Linux vendors >> (just to take the most obvious example) set a very confusing >> precedent. >> >> Shane, if would be super helpful if you took a look at: >> http://pkgs.org/search/hadoop >> http://pkgs.org/search/maven >> http://pkgs.org/search/subversion >> and pubished your narrative of how the ASF branding >> policies apply in both cases. >> >> The 3 projects I'm picking represent a pretty diverse >> set of cases of how PMCs are conducting themselves. > > OK, that will take some time. It would help if we can setup a call or > get someone to writeup a description of what those pages mean from the > larger perspective:
Understood. And perhaps this could be considered important enough so that we start a dedicated thread. Let me know if you'd also suggest moving to a more appropriate mailing list. > Trademarks are about preventing consumer confusion as to the source of > goods. So we need to consider this from the point of view of an > experienced software developer in the general sense - someone who is > *not* an Apache committer and not experienced with our products in > specific, but someone who is an experienced software developer, systems > architect, or devops type who's trying to evaluate a bunch of software > for their company. Fully agree with the goals. > The issue is I don't use pkgs.org (I use homebrew, but only for more > end-user applications recently), so I'm trying to translate to the > experience of an actual developer consumer who'd be trying to find and > use these products. pkgs.org is not actually a packaging system, but rather an index of almost all packages available on various Linux distributions. Think of it as Yellow Pages for ALL possible Linux packages. It is a good place to quickly get a sense of how ASF software gets represented in very different Linux distros. > The problem is that trademark analyses are much easier to do for > consumer products, and for physical goods. Software is inherently > different in that "marketing brochures" or store signs or packaging is > very different, and widely varied on a whole bunch of web pages. Plus, > most of our products are highly technical: very few computer end users > are downloading Hadoop or Maven - it's software developers who are > looking for these. So understanding the common software developer > perspective on how they see *where* these named downloadable software > products are being displayed matters. Makes total sense to me! [*] Thanks, Roman. [*] it is also, coincidentally, what I get so worked up when 'general public' in our release policy gets [mis]interpreted as mostly related to 'end users'. But that's a pet peeve for a different thread ;-)
