Hi Viral and Stefan,
Thanks for the replies.
To be clear, I have no opposition to a third party organization (e.g.
Julia Computing) hosting the web site as an in-kind donation to Julia
(the community project). The GNOME website, for instance, is currently
hosted by Canonical, and it has been hosted by Red Hat in the past. The
gnome.org domain, on the other hand, is owned by the GNOME Foundation,
which is how I believe it should be for a community .org.
The administrative cost to owning and periodically renewing a domain is
nevertheless nonzero, even though it is less than the cost of hosting
web/email/etc. I agree that it is important to make sure that the
organization tasked with maintaining it is able to do so without things
falling through the cracks, and I'd hope that NumFocus could handle this
as a fiscal sponsor; in fact, they mention hosting as a service they
offer at <http://numfocus.org/foundation/>.
As Viral mentions, when relying on NumFocus to do more it is important
to make sure they are adequately funded. I will plan to think more
about how we can raise funds for them to do Julia-related things. As a
first step, I just myself joined NumFocus as a Supporting Member, which
I had not realized was possible until now.
Jim
On 05/14/2015 07:13 PM, Viral Shah wrote:
As much as I would like to do so, I also want to have enough funding
for the "Julia foundation" (NumFocus) in place before transferring
over community resources.
We look at everything closely so that things don't fall through the
cracks. For someone else to do that, we need an organisational structure.
We are working hard with a couple of folks on funding some people to
work full time for the foundation. I welcome any ideas on raising
funds to pay for a couple of developers and a part time project
manager, to start with.
-viral
On 15 May 2015 5:47 am, "Stefan Karpinski" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Currently I own the domain, but transferring it to NumFocus would
be fine if they do that (which I can find out).
On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Jim Garrison <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Here is a related question: Who will own and operate the
julialang.org <http://julialang.org> domain? Would you be
willing to transfer it to NumFocus or a similar nonprofit,
community entity?
On Monday, May 11, 2015 at 10:55:00 AM UTC-7, Brian Granger
wrote:
Congrats on Julia Computing stuff! We (IPython/Jupyter)
are always thinking about various approaches to making
open source sustainable and it is great to see
explorations like this. I wish you the best of success!!!
I wanted to share some thoughts and questions about
trademark as it relates to open source projects. These
thoughts have come out of many years of thinking about,
and even enforcing, trademarks in the context of
Jupyter/IPython.
With IPython/Jupyter, the yet-to-be-filed trademarks
(there is a bit of subtlety about the IPython trademark -
that is another topic) will belong to our non-profit
sponsor, NumFocus (we will transfer it to them). Along
with that, we will be developing a trademark usage policy
that clarifies to the community how our names and logos
can be used. I am guessing that our policy will be similar
to that of other open source projects like Python:
https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/
It is likely that we will have a trademark policy that
allows generous usage of the names IPython/Jupyter by the
open source community, but we would not allow companies to
use the trademarks in ways that would confuse users. A
company could say "our platform uses the open source
Project Jupyter" but not "our company is called
JupyterFoo." IANAL, but it is my understanding that the
bar for trademark confusion is relatively low and that
there is a real danger to not enforcing trademarks, so
these issues are important to understand.
I think you can see where this is going wrt Julia...
* Who holds the trademarks on Julia? NumFocus, an
individual or Julia Computing?
* What is the trademark policy of that entity? If it
doesn't exist, who will create it?
* Is Julia Computing infringing upon the Julia trademark?
Has the trademark owner given permission to Julia Compute
to use the trademark?
* By using the name "Julia" in the company and open source
project, is the trademark owner creating a precedence of
not enforcing the trademark?
* Do you want *other* companies to be allowed to use
"Julia" trademarks in their name?
I want to be clear - I am all for commercialization
efforts around open source and am very excited about where
Julia is headed. I also don't have any ideas about what
the answers to these questions should be for your community.
Cheers,
Brian
On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 1:20:15 PM UTC-7, Viral Shah
wrote:
Hello all,
You may have seen today’s Hacker News story about
Julia Computing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298
As you all know, we are committed to Julia being high
quality and open source.
The existence of Julia Computing was discussed a year
ago at JuliaCon 2014, though we recognize that not
everyone is aware. We set up Julia Computing to assist
those who asked for help building Julia applications
and deploying Julia in production. We want Julia to
be widely adopted by the open source community, for
research in academia, and for production software in
companies. Julia Computing provides support,
consulting, and training for customers, in order to
help them build and deploy Julia applications.
We are committed to all the three organizations that
focus on different users and use cases of Julia:
1. The open source Julia project is housed at the
NumFocus Foundation. http://numfocus.org/projects/
2. Research on various aspects of Julia is anchored in
Alan’s group at MIT.
http://www-math.mit.edu/~edelman/research.php
<http://www-math.mit.edu/%7Eedelman/research.php>
3. Julia Computing works with customers who are
building Julia applications.
http://www.juliacomputing.com/
Our customers make Julia Computing self-funded. We are
grateful that they have created full time
opportunities for us to follow our passions. Open
source development will never cease.
You may have questions. Please shoot them here. We
will respond back with a detailed blog post.
-viral
