Question about project names, trademarks and best practices

[Matt Hogstrom <ma...@hogstrom.org>]

Back in November of last year we accepted a project into the Apache  
Incubator which is called Virtual Computing Lab (VCL).  The initial  
code base was donated by North Carolina State University and assigned  
to the ASF and is located at http://svn.apache.org/repos/incubator/asf/vcl 
.

A question was raised on the dev list about the vailidity of the use  
of the name VCL for the Apache Incubator project because there is some  
overlap with the use of that term at NC State.  The project existed at  
NC State and has a fairly well known name called VCL (see http://vcl.ncsu.edu/) 
.  Since NC State has assigned the code to Apache and the name of the  
project carries the same name what are the legal concerns about this  
relationship?

At this point NC State is no longer doing any development of VCL at NC  
State but has moved development to Apache and has contributors from a  
number of universities that currently use the project and have  
familiarity with the code and the "brand" of the project.  The  
community would like to maintain the name because of the goodwill it  
has at existing deployments.

I'd like to get some feedback, both legal and otherwise, for the  
project.  The team is interested in releasing its first Apache  
Incubator release and the name issue needs to be resolved.

Thanks

Matt

Re: Question about project names, trademarks and best practices

[Craig L Russell <Cr...@Sun.COM>]

On Apr 3, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Matt Hogstrom wrote:

> Back in November of last year we accepted a project into the Apache  
> Incubator which is called Virtual Computing Lab (VCL).  The initial  
> code base was donated by North Carolina State University and  
> assigned to the ASF and is located at http://svn.apache.org/repos/incubator/asf/vcl 
> .
>
> A question was raised on the dev list about the vailidity of the use  
> of the name VCL for the Apache Incubator project because there is  
> some overlap with the use of that term at NC State.  The project  
> existed at NC State and has a fairly well known name called VCL (see http://vcl.ncsu.edu/) 
> .  Since NC State has assigned the code to Apache and the name of  
> the project carries the same name what are the legal concerns about  
> this relationship?
>
> At this point NC State is no longer doing any development of VCL at  
> NC State but has moved development to Apache and has contributors  
> from a number of universities that currently use the project and  
> have familiarity with the code and the "brand" of the project.  The  
> community would like to maintain the name because of the goodwill it  
> has at existing deployments.

If development of VCL has really moved from NCSU, there is no  
indication of it on the VCL home page you referenced above http://vcl.ncsu.edu/

Wikipedia has a disambiguation page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCL  
that makes no mention of Apache or NCSU.

But there are two software projects listed on wikipedia that use the  
acronym:
	• Visual Class Library is the rendering and widget library for  
OpenOffice.org.
	• Visual Component Library is a computer programming library produced  
by Borland for program development under Microsoft Windows.

If you want to continue to use VCL, I'd recommend asking NCSU to make  
more obvious their donation to Apache and their intent to donate not  
only the code but the name. This would allow us to claim historic use  
of the name. If not, find another name.

Craig
>
>
> I'd like to get some feedback, both legal and otherwise, for the  
> project.  The team is interested in releasing its first Apache  
> Incubator release and the name issue needs to be resolved.
>
> Thanks
>
> Matt
>
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Craig L Russell
Architect, Sun Java Enterprise System http://db.apache.org/jdo
408 276-5638 mailto:Craig.Russell@sun.com
P.S. A good JDO? O, Gasp!