On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 4:39 AM, Stephen Connolly < stephen.alan.conno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We could define a hierarchy of right to use the mark: pmc has ultimate > right, if the pmc are not producing a packaging for that system then the > developers of the packaging system have the right to define who can use the > mark in relation to their packaging system only. > FWIW, the Foundation (board level) has the legal final authority, they delegate this to the VP Trademarks, who shares that delegation with the individual PMCs to adapt to each of their own unique circumstances. At no time do we state that others creating a binary from our released tarball/source is infringing our mark, if the result of what they built is limited to ASF sources - not extended or patched in a 'significant way'. PMC's must determine what is significant in this context... if someone patched httpd for 128 bit int sizes, that PMC would probably shrug (and work out the right patch upstream.) Any PMC distributing sources for a .jar are likely to flip out over modifying the public API's, and rightfully so. And we've noted here, many ASF project builds allow various things to be toggled-in/toggled-out. Clear labeling is a good way to avoid a PMC objecting to the use of the mark. There are some special things here we do have absolute control over. If a project wants to provide the 'official' build, why not start signing the .jar? Because only the ASF committers sign code "as the ASF" under the authority of the PMC, there is no concern about that .jar being a third-party component. Users could still build that .jar, because we give them the sources, on purpose, to deliberately do that. With few exceptions, downstream is very easy to work with when the PMC addresses their concerns clearly and politely. > The aim here would be to make our software available easily in different > packaging systems. The pmc may want to take ownership of popular packaging > systems, so we'd need to be able to trump others Keep in mind, every package distributor has their own policy for who gets naming priority. It can be helpful to point out that the ASF owns the mark, and should generally have priority, but the politics of the thing is that individual contributors to each package distributor have to earn their karma, just as we require here at the ASF. A signed vs. and unsigned build may also carry weight in those discussions.
