I think that I, amongst other people, are in danger of losing track of the trademark forest for the trees.
I'm copying trademarks@, which is a closed list, but I don't think that this discussion has to be restricted to private@. If anyone on trademarks@ cares to correct me, please copy the Maven dev list. Trademarks are marks 'used in commerce'. When lawyers, and in the extreme case, judges, discuss trademarks, they are concerned with how marks get used in the relatively real world. Web pages that describe products are high on their list of concerns. XML files and source code? Not so much. So, the first job of trademark defense is to worry about how web pages (and books and such) use our mark. The top of that list is to ask two questions: Is the 'first use' a full reference to 'Apache Maven'? And is there an attribution of the trademark? As a PMC, if we are politely enforcing these two things, we've done most of our job. The next question is the question raised by plugins. When someone offers a product in commerce that is closely related to ours, what do they call it, and how do they describe it? Again, plain old English usage is a lot more important than geek-delight strings that go into XML files. If the web page has a title like 'Popcorn plugin for Apache Maven', we're good. I suspect that we're good even if the string that goes into the xml file is 'maven-maven-maven-maven-maven-popcorn-plugin'. It strikes me that we could make this good situation more likely by making sure that the site tooling puts headings and titles on pages, by default, that are consistent with that pattern. This conversation has been focussed on the question of the string that goes into the XML file. If we wanted to make that problem go away, we could discourage the use of the string 'maven' in plugin artifactIds altogether. That would push the conversation towards the prose and away from the XML. But I'm not sure it matters. One of Stephen's points is that the artifactId strings have an influence on the prose: a thing with artifactId maven-popcorn-plugin seems to lead, inexorably, towards 'The Maven Popcorn Plugin', which is bad. But, is 'popcorn-maven-plugin' really so much better? I do understand the logic that it seems to lead more towards 'The Popcore plugin _for_ Maven'. Still, it seems to me that enforcing one or the other in the plugin-plugin is not much of a substitute for the annoying job of looking at web pages and sending polite reminders. I think that my point here is not 'leave the plugin-plugin' alone, but rather 'don't mistake changing it for an automated solution to the bulk of our trademark enforcement responsibilities.' Whether those responsibilities are reasonable is a discussion for another time and place. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org
