The brand issue is an important one to be aware of, but we shouldn't let
that block progress on evaluating the proposal or working with the
potential new community to see how they'd fit with The Apache Way.
A couple of other notes:
- Finding *factual* references to similar software product names is a
good thing to do up front, so we can be aware of any potential conflicts
for the future. However it's not as useful to try to analyze what the
potential issues are on a public list.
- The ASF is happy to host any like-minded project communities who are
willing to follow the core rules that we require of Apache branded
projects. Part of that hosting is offering the stable APACHE house
brand for the project community, as well as assistance in securing and
maintaining their project identity.
That said, we also have to recognize that where there are third parties
with pre-existing uses of similar software product names, we can't
necessarily offer the same level of defense for such a project name.
Depending on the case, we may decide that a podling community is willing
to accept the risk of future conflicts, and that's fine - as long as in
those cases we recognize that we may be forced to change a project name
in the future *if* the issue ever comes up.
The trick with trademarks are that in virtually all cases, "it depends".
The details matter - both on the legal details of some potential
conflict of names, *as well as* the actual behavior of the parties
involved. That is: just because there is an apparent conflict of names
does not always mean that the two parties can't reach an agreement to
each continue while recognizing each other's brands.
That being said, given the wide use of "stratos" as a name associated
with various cloud stuff these days, that I do recommend the proposal
submitters have a serious discussion about considering a new name.
- Shane (not subscribed, reading on archives)
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