Hi,
I wanted to address the concerns that many have manifested on the
mailing list around renaming OpenContrail. I prefer to do it in a new thread
that has nothing to do with the conversation about renaming it.
We all would prefer to stay with OpenContrail, but that is
impossible at this time. I would like to explain how we got here.
To recap, we’re in the process of creating a vehicle that would
allow community-led governance of OpenContrail. That process will result in
some kind of entity, besides Juniper, that owns the governance, codebase, and
related trademarks. There is no way around this, it is simply a result of this
entire process. A multi-vendor or multi-party entity has to takeover Juniper’s
prior role.
Now a brief aside on the trademarks and naming of products based on
OpenContrail. Regardless of LF’s practice on any of its projects, more
generally speaking once you have a multi-party entity that owns a trademark,
that entity decides what the trademark policy is surrounding its projects. For
example, in OpenStack, there is a certification program and products are named
“<Vendor Name> OpenStack”, such as RedHat OpenStack and Mirantis OpenStack.
For Hadoop, the project name is reserved, and instead vendors like Pivotal,
Cloudera, and Hortonworks use a different name for their product and the
project name of Hadoop is reserved for the open source project itself. We have
to take one of these paths regardless of where we land from a foundation
perspective.
What’s important to understand here is that whether we create our
own foundation or join another foundation, these issues will exist. They
cannot be avoided.
From my perspective, the preferred path was to assign the
OpenContrail trademark to the OpenContrail community and retain the Contrail
trademark. Unfortunately, all of the legal teams involved unanimously agreed
that this would make enforcement of either trademark problematic as the two
terms are too similar.
This meant that Juniper had to make a decision regarding assigning
the two trademarks together or retaining them. This created a quandary for us
and we debated the issue for a long time. It’s been months of wrangling to be
honest. Ultimately, we decided that while we had been giving a significant
amount to the community and the process of transitioning governance, we simply
could not justify the huge expense and opportunity cost to Juniper as a
business of renaming the Contrail product line.
So we are where we are. I can assure you that Greg and I did our
best to fight for a path forward to retain the OpenContrail name for the
community. We got as creative as we could, but there was simply no path
forward that worked.
I realize that many will be unhappy about this situation; however,
I think there is a big positive for us all. First, with the renaming, there is
even greater daylight between the open source project and Juniper Networks
which may encourage greater adoption from Juniper competitors. Second, it’s an
opportunity for the community to “put their own stamp on it” and “own” the
resulting project more fully.
This last point is critical. Your participation in the other email
thread about the new name is part of the community process of determining a new
name that we are both excited about and feel represents us together as a team.
PLEASE jump in and provide some name suggestions. No names are bad.
Hopefully this clarifies some of how we got here. Unfortunately,
further discussions about whether it is a good decision or not are basically
fruitless at this point. There aren’t other paths right now. I worked very
hard to find another one and if I could bring you a second option I would.
There is no other option. We are renaming OpenContrail. Yes, there are cons,
but there are also pros. Your participation is required to create a great
outcome.
Sincerely,
--Randy
Vice President, Technology & Strategy, Cloud Software
Juniper Networks
+1 (415) 787-2253 [Google Voice]
ASSISTANT: Stephanie Concepcion,
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
TWITTER: @randybias
LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/randybias
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