On Sat, 19 Mar 2005, Tim O'Brien wrote:
I think the Jolt awards knew better and were trying to send a message similar to the '94 nobel peace prize for Arafat, Peres, and Rabin (which incidentally didn't work very well). (Or, the '98 award for Hume and
You really think so?
My assumption is that SD Magazine/Jolt awards are relatively clueless as to what the ASF is, what a J2EE container is etc. I'm guessing that they're merely copying whatever the original nomination from a reader said.
Trimble for that matter.) Instead of firing off an email to SD, why not stop, observe that we haven't done a good job enforcing trademark and communicating philosophy and resolve to fix things going forward.
Going forward, wouldn't we protect the name in just this way? I think this is the earliest point at which we've been aware of the mistake.
As for the "a leading contributor" statement. You can't tell me this doesn't happen with other organizations. Anyone is perfectly free to make the observation that JBoss is "a leading contributor" to Tomcat much the same way I could say that BEA is "a leading contributor" to XMLBeans. Some of us may think it wrong, but it is open to editorial interpretation regardless of ASF philosophy.
Look at the list of other products. None of the rest are from an organization and its 'leading contributor', so it's not just something that SD commonly do and we just happen to take offence at the wording.
There are other mistakes there to be sure, is CollabNet really responsible for 'Subversion 2004' and not Tigris? That's for them to worry about though.
Let's change the corporation so as not to drill into the open cavity that is the ongoing spat between JBoss and the ASF. Instead focus on the (much less contentious) relationship between BEA and the ASF:
Reporter: BEA is a leading contributor to the XMLBeans product. ASF: Well, no, we really don't recognize corporations, we recognize individuals.
BEA do have a CCLA (afaik) because they contributed the initial codebase of XMLBeans. So it's far more acceptable to call BEA a contributor than it is to call JBoss a contributor; they've not contributed anything as a company.
Reporter: Great, but doesn't BEA employ a good number of XMLBeans contributors. ASF: Yes, a good number of them are employed by BEA... Reporter: Well, why can't I write "BEA is a leading contributor to..." ASF: Because, that's just not our philosophy it's about people not corporations Reporter: Oh, ok, sure, but why can't I just call it like I see it ASF: Because we think it is wrong Reporter: Thanks, I'll take it under advisement.
:-)
JBoss employ 2 out of 70 committers. Now, I'm sure many of those committers are inactive, but the Tomcat developer community can't be that small that 2 counts as the majority.
The only thing I'd ask JBoss to do is to change the menu link to "Apache Tomcat" from "Tomcat". Because they've agreed to our license, I believe we have every right to have them change "Tomcat" to "Apache Tomcat". I think that's a fair enforcement of trademark (even though I'm not certain we have a trademark). I believe it would help clarify things if the JBoss page prefaced the work Tomcat with the word Apache. That's it.
Yep, though this is a completely different letter obviously. It needs more thought as they've been asked to do this before in the past and haven't managed to stop making Tomcat look like a JBoss project.
Hen
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