(Apologies for breaking threading; not on the list) +1 to having a branding guideline; these are really helpful.
I've been quite impressed with the organization and independent governance the CloudStack PMC has shown over the past few years, as well as your work on promoting the brand. So having CloudStack work on your own specific policies for self-managing branding approvals makes sense, and something I support. The issue is that when dealing with trademark questions from third parties, both the issues (i.e. trademark law) and the consequences (i.e. withdrawing a mistaken approval is much harder than reverting a code change) require more care than most of our other work - like on code, communities, or the like. Similarly, when a community member asks for permissions to use Apache marks for such-and-such purpose, they're not generally asking for personal permission, but rather, their company asking for permission. The issue is that companies change leadership and direction (and lawyers) over time, so we need to ensure we're presenting the right message up front on branding permissions for third parties. ---- Personally, I'm hoping that we can clearly document delegating normal approvals (for cases already in the policy) to the CloudStack PMC directly, by whatever documented process you're comfortable with. I'm also hoping that you'll have documentation and comments on the process that we can use for pushing this general process to other Apache projects as well. In particular, the CloudStack community seems to be very good at both thinking through branding issues, as well as keeping an eye on independent governance. Any tips or comments you can provide on how you do this are helpful, especially so that we can better explain Apache brand policies to other Apache projects. ---- Separately, in terms of writing branding policy: it may sometimes feel that official policies are stricter than we expect actual use to be in some cases. The issue I see is that: for any place in our policy where we explicitly allow some kinds of use without any permissions, we need to be careful to write it so that even when some "unfriendly" organization reads it, it's clear to them what our limits are. Realistically, we are much more liberal with our allowed uses by third parties than most other trademark holders. However we do need to ensure that our written polices are clear enough that if we do ever need to take legal action against a trademark infringer, we have the ability to do so. Does that make sense, in terms of how we publicly present some policies? Thanks, - Shane
