RE: Who manages a project brand: Cloudstack

[Lawrence Rosen <lr...@rosenlaw.com>]

Now that it is (apparently?) decided that the Cloudstack project handles its
own trademarks, may I please make a suggestion to you.

I'm a naive user who can't tell a Cloudstack from an OpenStack [1]. You
might want to refer to your project as "Apache Cloudstack" far more often
than "Cloudstack" alone. Thus you can benefit from the "Apache" trademark of
the Foundation. That's what our Apache brand is useful for. Then later, when
the full brand crystallizes in the minds of the public, the shorter mark
will be sufficiently evocative and memorable to stand on its own.

For those of you who remember US car models: One famous automobile was the
"Cadillac Eldorado" (before it became simply an "Eldorado") and another was
the "Toyota Prius" (before it was simply a "Prius") in the minds of the
car-buying public. Of course, one failure was the "Ford Edsel" when the Ford
Motor Company stopped making the Edsel and refused to apply its Ford brand
to that dog. :-)

FYI, trademarks in practice....

/Larry

[1]
http://www.getfilecloud.com/blog/2014/02/a-game-of-stacks-openstack-vs-cloud
stack/#.U8q59vldXxU 


-----Original Message-----
From: Chip Childers [mailto:chipchilders@apache.org] 
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 8:36 AM
To: trademarks@apache.org
Subject: Re: Who manages a project brand

On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 04:38:35PM -0400, Sam Ruby wrote:
> The one thing I would like to see come out of this (in the fullness of
> time) isn't patches to say that Brand has delegated to Cloudstack, but 
> rather patches to the policy that make whatever accommodations the 
> CloudStack feels are appropriate available to *ALL* PMCs.

+1

As it stands now, there are 2 areas where we have an opportunity for to
bring something back to the trademarks committee.

1) We have handled some ambiguity in the events policy (which actually could
be turned into a patch now, since this has been in place and working for
quite some time now)

2) We are going to try to figure out if we have an appropriate model in mind
for our *PMC* collectively making specific statements of approval / denial
of a request. I don't see this necessarily as a patch to the foundation
policies, but perhaps as a suggested model (there may be
others) for communities to consider.

-chip

Re: Who manages a project brand: Cloudstack

[Sebastien Goasguen <ru...@gmail.com>]

On Jul 19, 2014, at 4:02 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lr...@rosenlaw.com> wrote:

> Now that it is (apparently?) decided that the Cloudstack project handles its
> own trademarks, may I please make a suggestion to you.
> 
> I'm a naive user who can't tell a Cloudstack from an OpenStack [1]. You
> might want to refer to your project as "Apache Cloudstack" far more often
> than "Cloudstack" alone. Thus you can benefit from the "Apache" trademark of
> the Foundation. That's what our Apache brand is useful for. Then later, when
> the full brand crystallizes in the minds of the public, the shorter mark
> will be sufficiently evocative and memorable to stand on its own.
> 

Our guidelines are published at:
http://cloudstack.apache.org/trademark-guidelines.html

We do encourage everyone to use the term "Apache CloudStack" instead of "CloudStack".
However as always shorter is a better.

On that vein I would mention that indeed folks talk about Hadoop, Cassandra, Maven etc…never about Apache Hadoop, Apache Cassandra etc.

In fact, most people don't know that Hadoop is an apache project.

Another vein to explore is that when you explain that CloudStack is a top-level project at Apache, people say "Oh mine too".
Then you "ask, really I did not know ?", "Oh yes of course it has an apache license".

So while we are doing our best to make the cloudstack brand stronger, at times I am saddened to see that the apache brand is not as strong as we might think.
And there is a ton of confusion between Apache, its projects and the license. For most Apache is still HTTP or the license.

-Sebastien


> For those of you who remember US car models: One famous automobile was the
> "Cadillac Eldorado" (before it became simply an "Eldorado") and another was
> the "Toyota Prius" (before it was simply a "Prius") in the minds of the
> car-buying public. Of course, one failure was the "Ford Edsel" when the Ford
> Motor Company stopped making the Edsel and refused to apply its Ford brand
> to that dog. :-)
> 
> FYI, trademarks in practice....
> 
> /Larry
> 
> [1]
> http://www.getfilecloud.com/blog/2014/02/a-game-of-stacks-openstack-vs-cloud
> stack/#.U8q59vldXxU 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chip Childers [mailto:chipchilders@apache.org] 
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 8:36 AM
> To: trademarks@apache.org
> Subject: Re: Who manages a project brand
> 
> On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 04:38:35PM -0400, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> The one thing I would like to see come out of this (in the fullness of
>> time) isn't patches to say that Brand has delegated to Cloudstack, but 
>> rather patches to the policy that make whatever accommodations the 
>> CloudStack feels are appropriate available to *ALL* PMCs.
> 
> +1
> 
> As it stands now, there are 2 areas where we have an opportunity for to
> bring something back to the trademarks committee.
> 
> 1) We have handled some ambiguity in the events policy (which actually could
> be turned into a patch now, since this has been in place and working for
> quite some time now)
> 
> 2) We are going to try to figure out if we have an appropriate model in mind
> for our *PMC* collectively making specific statements of approval / denial
> of a request. I don't see this necessarily as a patch to the foundation
> policies, but perhaps as a suggested model (there may be
> others) for communities to consider.
> 
> -chip
>