On dev-community, you mentioned something that caught my eye. Although it is a
bit OT, maybe not, Roman's observation on this thread (abridged below).
Indulge me in borrowing the key bit for me:
I get so worked up when 'general public'
in our release policy gets [mis]interpreted
as mostly related to 'end users'.
But that's a pet peeve for a different thread ;-)
I think that the general public becomes involved in multiple ways.
First and foremost has to do with the next-in-line adopter of an Apache Project
release. That can be two-fold when there are convenience binaries that have
quite different next-in-line adopters, as for Apache OpenOffice.
Although take-up of the AOO source for packaging in Linux distributions is not
a significant factor (LibreOffice having that distribution case pretty well
nailed down), there are next-in-line integrators and customizers.
For AOO a key consideration is that the software is for end-user purposes and
somewhere end-users and the general public touch it massively. And that
software and those users come back to the project with their Bugzilla issues,
mailing list reports, forum searches, etc. They are certainly and clearly in
the cycle of learning-and-improvement and their adoption of the software,
however binaries reach them, is a big deal.
This may be an aberration with respect to the ASF prototypical case, but it is
not so much with respect to open-source itself. And authenticity and
protection of the brand/trade-mark are serious. I suspect similar
considerations arise for software that has end-user importance, whether for
productivity, web browsing, social connections, or tools for media and image
creation.
The key point is that knowing the *variety* of next-in-line adopters is
important, including is the ultimate end-points where usability, reliability,
and other continuation-influencing factors feed back to the project very
directly.
Just sayin'
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: shaposh...@gmail.com [mailto:shaposh...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Roman
Shaposhnik
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 21:11
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: apache binary distributions
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 1:02 PM, Marvin Humphrey <mar...@rectangular.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
> This thread is long and bendy. What is it that you want to achieve?
Three things:
[ ... ]
3. Have Shane (as VP of Brand) and a few active PMC members
(like Stephen Connolly) express their view points on how ASF
brands are being used by downstream Linux packagers, since this
is the prototypical relationship between the Foundation and *any*
downstream.
Based on #3 I feel like I might have a few potential suggestions to clarify
our written policy, but I'd like to see the feedback first.
Thanks,
Roman.
P.S. Thanks to all who chimed in with very good feedback!
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--- Begin Message ---
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Shane Curcuru <a...@shanecurcuru.org> wrote:
> On 8/16/15 4:25 PM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Shane Curcuru <a...@shanecurcuru.org> wrote:
>>> On 8/7/15 7:53 AM, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
>>>> Bill,
>>>> So I can release "Niclas Hadoop platform, based on Apache Hadoop" ?? I
>>>> thought the discussion a few years ago was that this was misleading...
>>>
>>> No, you cannot. See our actual trademark policy:
>>>
>>> https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/#products
>>>
>>> Our release policy, as Roman originally asked about, applies only to ASF
>>> projects, and has no bearing on third parties. However our trademark
>>> policy, and trademark law, prevents third parties from publicly
>>> providing software using our trademarks.
>>>
>>> Our operational policies only apply to our projects, just like any other
>>> corporation. Some policies, like our license itself and our formal
>>> trademark policy, inform the rest of the world how they are allowed to
>>> use our websites, software code, and brands.
>>>
>>> Make sense?
>>
>> It does, but our relationships with downstream Linux vendors
>> (just to take the most obvious example) set a very confusing
>> precedent.
>>
>> Shane, if would be super helpful if you took a look at:
>> http://pkgs.org/search/hadoop
>> http://pkgs.org/search/maven
>> http://pkgs.org/search/subversion
>> and pubished your narrative of how the ASF branding
>> policies apply in both cases.
>>
>> The 3 projects I'm picking represent a pretty diverse
>> set of cases of how PMCs are conducting themselves.
>
> OK, that will take some time. It would help if we can setup a call or
> get someone to writeup a description of what those pages mean from the
> larger perspective:
Understood. And perhaps this could be considered
important enough so that we start a dedicated thread.
Let me know if you'd also suggest moving to a more appropriate
mailing list.
> Trademarks are about preventing consumer confusion as to the source of
> goods. So we need to consider this from the point of view of an
> experienced software developer in the general sense - someone who is
> *not* an Apache committer and not experienced with our products in
> specific, but someone who is an experienced software developer, systems
> architect, or devops type who's trying to evaluate a bunch of software
> for their company.
Fully agree with the goals.
> The issue is I don't use pkgs.org (I use homebrew, but only for more
> end-user applications recently), so I'm trying to translate to the
> experience of an actual developer consumer who'd be trying to find and
> use these products.
pkgs.org is not actually a packaging system, but rather an index
of almost all packages available on various Linux distributions.
Think of it as Yellow Pages for ALL possible Linux packages.
It is a good place to quickly get a sense of how ASF software
gets represented in very different Linux distros.
> The problem is that trademark analyses are much easier to do for
> consumer products, and for physical goods. Software is inherently
> different in that "marketing brochures" or store signs or packaging is
> very different, and widely varied on a whole bunch of web pages. Plus,
> most of our products are highly technical: very few computer end users
> are downloading Hadoop or Maven - it's software developers who are
> looking for these. So understanding the common software developer
> perspective on how they see *where* these named downloadable software
> products are being displayed matters.
Makes total sense to me! [*]
Thanks,
Roman.
[*] it is also, coincidentally, what I get so worked up when 'general public'
in our release policy gets [mis]interpreted as mostly related to 'end users'.
But that's a pet peeve for a different thread ;-)
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