Back in November of last year we accepted a project into the Apache
Incubator which is called Virtual Computing Lab (VCL). The initial
code base was donated by North Carolina State University and assigned
to the ASF and is located at http://svn.apache.org/repos/incubator/asf/vcl
.
A question was raised on the dev list about the vailidity of the use
of the name VCL for the Apache Incubator project because there is some
overlap with the use of that term at NC State. The project existed at
NC State and has a fairly well known name called VCL (see http://vcl.ncsu.edu/)
. Since NC State has assigned the code to Apache and the name of the
project carries the same name what are the legal concerns about this
relationship?
At this point NC State is no longer doing any development of VCL at NC
State but has moved development to Apache and has contributors from a
number of universities that currently use the project and have
familiarity with the code and the "brand" of the project. The
community would like to maintain the name because of the goodwill it
has at existing deployments.
I'd like to get some feedback, both legal and otherwise, for the
project. The team is interested in releasing its first Apache
Incubator release and the name issue needs to be resolved.
Thanks
Matt
