Re: What is the legal basis for enforcing release policies at ASF?

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Shane Curcuru <[email protected]> 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.

Thanks,
Roman.