On Sep 8, 2016, at 1:54 PM, Oliver Lietz <apa...@oliverlietz.de> wrote: > > On Tuesday 06 September 2016 08:14:13 Roy T. Fielding wrote: >> It was a response to a third party's legal demand, not a marketing fail. A >> change to the name used by the software is suggested, not just a change of >> the language name. In fact, the language name would not normally be an >> issue. > > If it may be a legal issue* to the project I would have expected at least a > notice to the PMC's mailing list. And I wonder if removing Sightly from all > package and class names *now* is not the safest route to go. > > Regards, > O.
In general, legal issues often come with a limited audience and a default of "cannot be shared in public". AFAIK, this issue was not directed to the Apache Sling project; it was directed at Adobe. Someone at Adobe, regardless of the merits of the service mark, decided that a name change for the language would be the best course of action for Adobe. I assume that is because we use the language name within AEM, which might theoretically be interpreted as a software as a service business (for some installs). I have not seen the actual C&D letter, so that's all I know about the subject. The other Sling developers who happen to work at Adobe are probably less informed about the subject, which is why I have attempted to explain it. As Bertrand mentioned, the next step should have been a discussion at Apache (on dev) about the language name having been changed and suggestions for what changes (if any) might be made to the Sling API. I have not been following dev closely enough to know whether that has occurred, but it certainly is my expectation as well. You are right to question it. > * which doesn't rule out a marketing fail, as it's marketing's job to do > brand > research and find out about possible naming conflicts Umm, no. Legal does that only when a name is chosen for a public product or service. In this case, our developers chose the name for their language project before the name became a registered service mark. We don't even use the name for a service, but we do talk about it as a feature. It's not that big a deal. Certainly not an excuse to cast blame. IANAL, but I seriously doubt Apache would be subject to a service mark dispute over one of our names. This only affects downstream businesses. However, once we know a legal land mine exists, it would be irresponsible to include it within an Apache product even if it can't directly impact the open source code. It is far easier to just change the name. Cheers, ....Roy
