[beyond-licensing] potential practical outcomes

Shane Curcuru asf at shanecurcuru.org
Thu Apr 21 14:07:46 UTC 2016


I've only been on the list a few weeks, but am looking forward to
meeting folks tonight in Boston!

One area I haven't heard brought up is branding.  Corporations have long
experience and large budgets for marketing their brands.  FOSS
communities and the people who govern them (usually) have neither.  This
is a highly asymmetrical situation, and one that's critical in the early
establishment of projects (as well as maintenance: witness the problems
with Hadoop[1]).  "Great new Foo.js!  Let's jump on!  Oh, wait, $BigCo
seems to be backing it; never mind."

"Brand" compromises a lot of different things, and is really about the
perception of outsiders to a group's reputation.  The specific
instantiation of a brand is a trademark, which is a legal area woefully
poorly understood by FOSS communities (and some companies too).  Working
with Apache project branding issues over the past years, the key points
are that you need a policy, and you need to have *specific* examples or
guidelines for companies to follow.
...

Allison Randal wrote on 4/20/16 11:06 PM:
> I set myself the time-consuming task of reading through the list archive
> so far to find all the good suggestions, but this has proven to be a
> very busy week. So, I'll just send this start, people can pile in, and
> I'll add more as I find things from the archives.
> 
> There many topics we can talk about (and probably will), but it's easier
> to keep a conversation moving forward with a clear idea of the thing
> (document/program/campaign/etc.) you want to produce as a result of the
> conversation. So, this is a quick round of idea-gathering, no need for
> anything more than bullet points. Afterwards, if it doesn't seem
> immediately obvious which one we want to dive into first, we might do a
> CIVS ranking poll of the choices.
> 
> Here are a few that have come up already, with my own best guess on the
> type of outcome they'd be:
> 
> - Program: OSaaS standard (w/ logo etc)
> 
> - Campaign: persuade companies to stop using "community" when they
> really mean "open source", and stop using "enterprise" when they really
> mean "proprietary"

Can you be more specific?  I completely get what you mean, but educating
FOSS communities on how to apply this is one task; providing techniques
for FOSS communities to enforce this on various companies out there is
another task.  Both of those tasks are hard, and unless you have very
specific guidelines, they will have to be repeated several times (or
more) for each new company that comes out to misuse a FOSS project brand
next month - and next month...

We need to get FOSS communities to crisply define what their brands are
(governance-wise and public appearances-wise), and show corporate
marketing departments a clear way that they can comply with usage
guidelines.

If the communities we want to help aren't effectively in charge of their
own brands, then all the rest of the policies and outcomes we come up
with will only help the software world so much.

- Shane

[1] HADOOP is a registered trademark in the US and several other
countries, however it still regularly gets abused.  Hot markets and lots
of new, VC funded companies are a very hard problem for volunteer
communities to manage.



More information about the beyond-licensing mailing list