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Posted to legal-discuss@apache.org by "Roman Shaposhnik (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org> on 2020/08/12 18:48:00 UTC
[jira] [Commented] (LEGAL-528) Is it required to remove company
names from donated software?
[ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-528?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17176537#comment-17176537 ]
Roman Shaposhnik commented on LEGAL-528:
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It is actually both. If the donation is sizable enough and was developed long enough outside of ASF an SGA (Software Grant Agreement) is advisable to establish IP provenance. This is strictly the software licensing side of things.
The other question you're asking is on the trademark side of things (nothing to do with licensing – these two are completely orthogonal). On the trademark side of things we've strongly advised all the projects to migrate to ASF controlled branding for their APIs (e.g. org.apache.<project> for Java ones). However, we've also made exceptions on a case-by-case basis to accommodate precisely the kind of situation you're describing. I suggest you take a look at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GEODE-37 for prior art (note that this rename was done on a code base that existed form more than 30 years and accumulated quite a few clients).
Long story short, what we will be looking for is that PMC actually has a plan, but I don't think anyone will be putting a strict deadline on when the transition need to complete. If you decide to seek and exception – said plan is a good place to articular why you think that exception needs to be granted.
> Is it required to remove company names from donated software?
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: LEGAL-528
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-528
> Project: Legal Discuss
> Issue Type: Question
> Components: Policy Question
> Reporter: Adam Holmberg
> Priority: Major
>
> Seeking some input from ASF legal. Please let me know if this is not the right avenue.
> In the Cassandra project we’re working toward donating a handful of client drivers into project governance. There is a set of drivers that were developed open source, but outside the project, which eventually became defacto standards. We’re now trying to bring them into the project (additional context in the [draft proposal|https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e0SsZxjeTabzrMv99pCz9zIkkgWjUd4KL5Yp0GFzNnY/edit#]).
> Some of the drivers have a company name, “datastax” in their package names. There is a question about whether this must be removed from the software in order for this donation to be approved. This might be done in the interest of purity, but the major downside is that it will break every application and ecosystem integration in existence.
> Is it absolutely necessary to remove company names when donating existing software, or is it sufficient to sign over the IP in a [grant|http://www.apache.org/licenses/proposed/software-grant.txt]?
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