Thanks Dave for including the links to some of the existing
trademark-related pages.
There are a few high level points about branding at the ASF that are
useful to have a better understanding of, very briefly:
- The ASF holds all trademarks on behalf of, and for the benefit of,
each of it's projects. This ensures that users can be assured in the
long term that our brands will be managed fairly and evenly.
- One of my goals with trademark policy is to move to a state where many
of the common requests are covered by existing FAQ entries. So I'm
hoping - over time, and as we codify more specific policy decisions for
ways of using Apache brands that we're happy with.
A key point is that as an all volunteer organization, we need to try to
provide as many answers in existing FAQs to let third parties find many
answers themselves, or to allow us to simply respond to queries the the
URL to a FAQ that addresses their issue. In my experience on other
projects, most requesters that have a FAQ entries, the requester is
happy to simply get the link to the FAQ without having the community to
vote and go through the whole process.
- Third parties with trademark requests need to be provided both a
public and a private way to make requests. We should certainly
encourage people to submit questions on public lists; this helps the
whole community. But in some cases, a third party may have a new idea
or project that they want to keep confidential; in those cases we need
to respect the privacy of their request if needed (i.e., sometimes we
should allow them to ask on ooo-private@).
----
I agree some key migration issues that the PPMC needs to address include:
- Better explaining to users and third parties how we expect people to
use our brands - which in the near future will include two brands; the
existing openoffice.org mark, and the to-be-decided mark like Apache
OpenOffice for the project going forward.
- Figuring out a specific workflow for third parties to 1) check the
FAQ, or other areas that may answer their question directly, or 2) a
place to make a specific permission request.
- Shane Curcuru
VP, Brand Management
The Apache Software Foundation
P.S. Useful Trademark related documents at the ASF:
Formal policy:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/
What PMCs are required to do on their sites:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/pmcs.html
What PMC members are expected to be responsible for:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/responsibility.html
A basic step-by-step How To for PMCs who want to address potential
infringements:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/reporting.html
Some key FAQ's (I want to expand this!) about specific trademark issues:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq
A listing (partial!) of Apache marks:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/list
(This definitely needs updating, especially to reflect which ones are
registered marks in various jurisdictions).
Rationale section of the Domain Name policy, which I think is one of the
best places (so far) that I've written that explains the *why* of hour
our Apache brand policies are they way they are:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/domains.html#rationale
The Incubator's existing Podling branding requirements (should be
updated to better explain and match the PMC requirements someday)
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/branding.html
