 So, we'll get started with practical trademark law for open source projects. This is an overview presentation that I think is valuable both for business people and people running their projects, as well as for Apache Committers and PMC members. Both sides are important, and there's a lot of misunderstanding in this whole area. And this is, we have time today given this place, so if you do have questions along the way, I'd be happy to take some as we go along. This is a sort of a higher level overview about how brands and trademarks actually work, not necessarily as detailed in terms of what we might want Apache projects to do, but that's what I'm here for to help explain. So I am, my name is Shane Kirkaroo. I serve as the vice president of brand management for the whole of the ASF. So that's setting the branding and trademark policies for all 181 projects of ours, including podlings and other things. And I've been involved at Apache since 1999. And I am not a lawyer, so I don't actually have to say that this is not legal advice because I couldn't give you legal advice not being a lawyer. If you do have questions, we have a privately archived mailing list called trademarks.apache.org. So anytime you have a question, that's the place to ask. And I, along with some other Apache members, will read and answer questions there. So what are we going to talk about today? There's a lot of misunderstanding about how trademark law actually intersects with the real life of software products, especially open source software products. So let's work on defining the terms around trademark law, which is what lawyers would think of, with how they actually work in real life with open source, with licensed software that we all share and use and so on. So some of these, I'm going to run through a couple of these pretty quickly because I think it's going to be pretty obvious to everybody here at ApacheCon what this means. It runs the world. So at another conference I actually had to ask, do you use open source in your organization? Do you contribute, do you build on top of whatever? Yes, you do. And everybody who comes to ApacheCon, that's part of what your business probably is. But what's important here is that when it comes to branding and trademarks and the way a project behaves, open source projects work differently than corporate projects tend to. We have both different people running our projects. We also have often different motivations for how we care about our brand and how we care about people using our software or using our brand and our reputation. So that's why it's important for this kind of talk that we understand how open source is different than your traditional software vendor in terms of how to use their brand and how they treat trademarks. One important thing, not just for open source, but overall is that today's fast moving software world, software is built from components. So we sometimes talk about a single product, but sometimes we talk about the LAMP stack or a big data processing pipeline with Hadoop and Spark and something else on top and then Miso is to manage the cluster behind it. That's an issue for the lawyers and for to some degree the marketers because it's not always clear where the actual trademark is. Trademarks are very specific symbols that map to a very specific product or service and when we have a bunch of components that we're putting together some Apache projects, we're running on top of a specific Linux distro, then a company wants to come and build their special sauce that manages it. There's really three different names we may be talking about in that offering to some customer. Which ones of those are trademarks? Sometimes lawyers have, when we talk to lawyers, they'll say, oh, this is the trademark and you'll be like, that's not it. This is what we talk about. They're like, no, no, that's the trademark. But really, software trademarks should be easy because the open source ethos is sharing, right? We want to share our work. Somebody said, permissively licensed products are practically giving away their software, or they are. The name is the only thing of value that the project itself can own and control. So the advice to corporate consumers is don't mess with open source project names because that's really the only control mechanism they have in terms of their reputation because when code is infinitely forkable, everybody can have the code and the technology. But where the name and the community goes is important. And this is doubly true for open source because open source communities are more often made up of developers and geeks and so on, and often of distributed groups who are underrepresented in terms of legal representation. So when you're thinking about this in the context of another vendor and should we use their branding, should we include it marketing, there are ways to decide that. Open source projects don't have those resources to help them understand the issues, whether it's them using your name or them finding out that you're using their name. So we need to be extra careful with how we think about trademarks with open source projects. So if I'm talking about people not understanding, we should be more specific about definitions. What are trademarks? So it might seem obvious, but it's really important to understand that legally trademarks are a very specific thing. I call it a trademark is a legal instantiation of your brand. So the trademark is the specific name or logo, the actual logo, not just some version of the logo, the logo you have on your home page that refers to a specific software product or a service offering, for example. It doesn't really mean to lawyers the logo that points to your GitHub repo. That's a really interesting question I have is if I have just a GitHub repo and I plaster my name over it and I have a logo, can I call those trademarks? Well, lawyers would be like, no. Geeks might be, well, yeah, it's code, okay. Is it a software product? That's a place where the law doesn't really mesh with how the developers work with different products these days. Trademark lawyers in particular will nag you to use them properly. Trademarks should be adjectives. The trademark describes the product or service. So I buy Kleenex brand tissues and we might use the jQuery JavaScript library because it's faster than the T-script framework. Trademark describes the thing. That's how you know that this is the trademark for that product. Now in common usage, we often skip that over. We sort of say we're running Hadoop jobs on top of Docker, on top of Moby now actually, right? But it's important to use your own trademarks consistently and to mark them with a TM or an R and to say Hadoop software or rather Apache Hadoop software on your homepage so that other people can see you're doing it seriously. Even if they may not notice, their lawyers or their marketers will notice if you are using your names consistently. We also have for Apache projects, we have a naming guide. So how we would like companies to use the names and brands of Apache software projects. So there's a link up here with that. So again, how does the trademark law apply to our open source projects and code and so on? Well, don't confuse projects with products. So this is something that I find myself writing over and over in emails and probably confusing people because they're like oh, so and so, project blah blah blah, that's the name. I'm like, that's the name of the project around the community really, what the trademark lawyers and if you ever have an issue where you need to talk to somebody about, hey, you're using my trademark wrong. Trademark applies to the product. So the thing that somebody downloads is what's actually trademarked. The project name, the community, the website is not typically a trademark. It may be a trademark for the service you provide and that you provide consulting or Apache projects, answer questions. We provide support, not paid support, but we provide support. But it's really tricky for the lawyers. Now usually, it doesn't matter the legal definitions, but it helps to understand a little bit about where the lawyers would come from when questions come up. Because we also have multiple products from different projects. Earlier I said the example that we might have this stream processor from Apache and that database from this company and you're adding this management console from that company, they're separate bits, what the trademarks refer to can be important. And of course, open source is geeky. So one of the things I often talk to companies who perhaps don't come to Apachecon about is even though our projects may seem geeky and we may not have a development roadmap and a marketing plan like other vendors do, we take our code and we take our brands just as seriously as some other vendor does. So when you're using a brand or a trademark from an open source project, you need to treat it as respectfully as you would some other vendor. Because the people running most projects are very passionate about them. There's often a much more personal connection to the Hadoop Elephant or the Flink Squirrel logo than would be in a commercial product out there. And open source projects are often not as familiar with trademark law. So they won't understand things they should complain about versus things they can't. And sometimes they'll sort of complain in a very crazy and loud way, which you'd wanna avoid if you're using our names. So what is the real purpose of a trademark? So a lot of people I think don't come to it from the right perspective in that really, trademarks aren't for us building software at Apache and then giving it away and then companies who use it to then build their own products on top of, which is great and then make money. Trademarks are really about the other people, the users out there. That's the easiest way to understand how trademark law is supposed to work. So trademarks really are about preventing consumer confusion as to the producer or the source of goods. So when a new user is searching on Google and looking for something, if they get to somebody else's website by finding, if they go to somebody else's website by searching for Hadoop and then download something they think is Hadoop from somebody else's website, that's bad, that's confusing in consumer as to who is providing the product. That's something that's typically pretty easy in physical goods because you understand a Coke bottle looks like this and you buy it from a store and you can go back to the store and complain. Software on the internet, there's no boxes anymore. So understanding who it is that's providing the product is important because consumers, what is the value to a brand? It's that when a consumer sees the brand they expect a certain behavior, they expect a certain quality, certain level of reputation and support. And if somebody else who's a fly by night operator is giving away software with your name on it, consumers will be angry because they got the wrong thing by mistake. And of course that's bad for you. So really that's the way to think about, if you need to think about what the trademark for the product is and how it should be used, think about the perspective of a new consumer coming to try to find it. And would they be clear that the name you're thinking of is associated with your product or your Apache project? So as a corollary, trademarks only have a use in commerce. So you can't just trademark something by writing it down like copyrights. You can only register a trademark, which we'll get to later. If you're actually using it, if you're actually sticking in the old fashioned world, if you're actually sticking the name on a box and putting it in a store for somebody to buy, until you do that it's not actually a trademark in most countries. But actually doing that or on a website saying, hey download Apache Flink software here. Once you put that up on a website, that's your trademark. Apache Flink is your trademark for this software product that somebody can download. And in the US and Canada at least, once you do that, and if you put a little TM symbol next to it, you can start accruing some legal rights to that trademark, some common law rights. Now this is one place where I need to warn people I'm primarily talking about US law here. Every country has their own specific trademark law. And many other countries work a little bit differently than the US does. But in the US at least, if you are consistently saying, hey, get super thing here, that's your trademark once you're actually providing it to the public. So the obvious important thing, which I don't think we need to talk about here, but in other places, in other conferences, this is really important, is that open source product names are trademarks. And companies out there need to respect them. And there are still plenty of companies who otherwise are clueful who don't really get that. Some part of them gets it, but a lot of the marketing departments don't and end up abusing a lot of open source projects, including a number of Apache projects. So we have plenty of great companies who work with us well. And we have some great companies, and we have Alan here who gave a talk this morning who not only work with us well, but they are leading training for their employees of how to work well with open source projects. All we want is respect and credit. So it's not that hard, but you do need to think about it. And this is a real example. We hate it when your users report bugs to us. So think about especially Linux distributions and downstream, where the users may not be really realized whether it's Fedora or Red Hat or something different, and they end up reporting the corporate bug to the open source project. That's just, you know, the user doesn't know any better perhaps, but the open source project can't do anything about it. And we're already have enough to do. So there's a real reason to make sure the branding is distinct and that you respect the open source project branding. So one thing I hear some people say is, but it's open source. So I should be able to share everything, right? Like you gave it away. Well, no. And this slide is a perfect example of where when you have a lawyer in the room and a bunch of geeks and a bunch of business people and even a few marketing people, they'll be saying, oh, we're using such and such open source project from Apache or Eclipse or wherever and we want to use in our branding campaign and it's open source so we can do this. And literally everyone in the room, except maybe one marketer, will be like, oh, it's open source. It's already, it's free. And the lawyer, and they'll sort of start talking about that without thinking about it. And the lawyer will not say anything because nobody's asked them a question, but the lawyer will realize, okay, it's open source software. We need to think about the IP. Why are you talking about trademarks? This license says nothing about trademarks and trademarks have nothing to do with copyright licenses. So all OSI approved licenses are copyright licenses. And they give you all these free, great things you can do. Rights not explicitly mentioned in a license are not granted at all. So I appreciate that at least the GPL and the Apache license explicitly exclude or effectively exclude trademarks. But all the other licenses out there that don't say anything about trademarks do not give you any trademark rights. They only give you copyright rights. And once you have the lawyer in the room and you start saying, okay, we're gonna use the trademark for this, then the lawyer will suddenly say, you can't do that. And you'll be like, why? And they'll be like, well, you don't have a right. And you'll say, well, it's open source. And the lawyer's like, but there's no trademark in the open source. It's common thing that people don't realize. So I point that out. Yes, we have a question. Okay, so the question is, are there good sources to help explain the difference between, I don't have a specific source for that. There certainly are plenty of sort of basic explainers, but you're right, a really good explainer that's focused on open source software. Yes, yes, a lot of the existing ones. That's a good question. Yeah, I'll look at that. There's a couple of lawyers I know who actually have some good explainers I have linked later about trademarks. And that might be a really useful aspect because open source projects are really important nowadays. And the intersection of those is really important when you have a bunch of open source projects with different licenses and a corporate product you wanna build. And if we could have even a little more understanding with all of us, that would greatly save the amount of time the lawyers have to spend later on educating us. So, okay, we'll do that later. So in real life though, not with the lawyers usually, how do trademarks work with open source software? So, okay, we've talked about what the trademarks are, but what does that mean? Can I say this about Apache Spark or I can't say that. How can people use your trademark or an Apache projects trademark, which is what I care about. When someone else is, in particular, when someone else is using our trademarks, how do we know if it's okay or not? We should complain or if we should be happy with it. Well, there's the likelihood of confusion test, which measures a few things. And there are literally, I have not yet figured out a better and more concise way to explain it to you than to simply read the paragraph from the US Patent and Trademark Office, which says, a likelihood of confusion exists between two or more trademarks. When the trademarks are so similar and the goods and or services for which those trademarks are used are so related that consumers would mistakenly believe they come from the same source, the two products from the same source. So each trademark registration application at the US PTO is decided on its own facts and no strict mechanical test exists for determining the likelihood of confusion. I mean, if I really need to help explain it, I can talk about it for a while longer, but that really is the simplest way to think about it. Would a consumer, would a user, when they're thinking they want that crisp, not too sweet sharp taste that comes in this swervy bottle with red and white logo, could they ever be confused by getting that other drink that has a sweeter taste that usually has a red and white logo? If they would, if they would go to the store and pick up the wrong one and drink it and be surprised, that's confusion. If they would never do that because they always could see the difference in the bottles, then there's no confusion. Or if you have something that's not a soft drink, they're probably not gonna be confused. So it's kind of like designed to have the lawyers always have a job because you always need a lawyer to tell. In real life, plenty of trademark misuse happens and it doesn't really matter that much. So it's not that big a deal. This is not a black and white world. This is a gray world and it depends if it's important. But when is it okay to use a trademark? To use somebody else's trademark, rather? Well, there's a term for that. It's called the nominative use. And in the US and several other countries, it's a specific legal concept. So the rest of the world is allowed to use your trademark to refer to your thing. I mean, we have to be able to talk about Hortonworks or Cloudera or IBM because we wanna use their products or because we know somebody who works there. We have to talk about their thing using their name. There's no other way to refer to it. I drive a BMW and I can't explain to you what kind of car I drive unless I say it's a BMW. That's fine because it's clearly referring to the car that comes from bearish modern workings. You can't imply a relationship or affiliation or endorsement because that might confuse somebody to thinking that you're part of them. But you can post negative reviews. You can post bad benchmarks. You can say, you know, Yo-Yo Dynes super accelerator really sucks because of blah, blah, blah. Because you're referring to their thing. That's not a trademark issue. Now they may not like you, but there's no trademark problem with that because you're not confusing somebody as to where Yo-Yo Dynes super thing comes from. You can even do parodies and non-commercial free speech. Trademark law certainly is never gonna touch free speech or other areas like that. Trademark law, at least in the U.S., is pretty specific at only helping to protect specific kinds of commerce. So it's really not that broad even though people don't understand that. So what's the other end of the scale from nominal to use, which is okay. The other end is infringement. So this is where there's a problem. This is where you should complain and this is where legally you can actually could take action to stop somebody from misusing your brand. Again, I'll read the USPTO statement because it's so complicated that this is the best explanation in a short time. Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods or services in a manner, so in a way in the real world, that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or a mistake about the source of the goods or services. The point there is trademarks only exist in a place where there's some producer who has goods or services that they provide to the world. And there are users who are looking for goods and services. If they kind of know about your product or your company and they go search and they find somebody else's website, if they then say, huh, maybe this is what I want and they go download it, that's infringement because they were misled thinking that the brand image they had of you was actually the other side. If they go to the other website and say, oh, well, there's this comparison about, super thing and giant thing, but I don't want that one. I want something else and they keep looking for you. That's not confusion. So it's really about can someone associate the brand image they have with the producer of a specific good? Is it, we have another question? Mm-hmm, yes. So the question is about Debian, the Linux distribution in the past, wanted to include the Firefox web browser and there was a trademark issue and for a while they instead would bundle the Iceweasel web browser, which was the same exact code with just a different logo. Yes, that was a trademark issue. So the particular way that the Mozilla trademark for Firefox and the logos, they have a usage policy, they're trademarks of Mozilla that says you must do this, you must do this, you can't change the logo, whatever. And Debian in particular has a very, they have the Debian social contract. So a lot of their policies about software are about free software and about you must be able to change things. And there was a conflict, Mozilla said, no, you can't change this for your use. And Debian said, well, fine, we'll make it Iceweasel. We'll take the code, we shave off the name and the logo. But yes, that was a trademark issue. And that was an unfortunate one where Debian is a respected enough producer that it never would have been an issue in the real world. The only issue was the policies of the two organizations didn't quite match. And if they had both said, okay, in this case, we both are reputable players, we'll shave this little piece of policy for you, it would have been fine. But they didn't and that's what needs to happen because you need to respect everybody else's trademark as much as you do need to respect licenses. Another question? So I don't, the question is, are there legal rulings on the use of trademarks in search engines, in particular for keyword search, buying an ad? I'm not aware of them specifically, but I don't initially follow them. That's a tricky case because a lot of trademark law is pretty far behind how the actual software world is used. So how we work in software and do code, that has nothing to do with trademarks. But how we say, hey, come download my stuff because it's cool, or a company says, hey, we have five new products and want people to find it. That is part of a trademark law. And trademark law is not caught up to that in detail. There certainly are, if you ask your lawyers, they certainly will say certain things. The question is, is the use in the search engine context itself an infringement? And that's tricky because the searching process isn't necessarily gonna be part of the buying decision process. So if that search process brings you to their web page that's clearly branded inappropriately and then you buy the product, then yes, that's a problem. That's infringement. If it brings you to their page and they have a comparison page saying, hey, we're so much better than those guys are, the user's not gonna be confused as to who is providing one of those two things. Now it may be unfair competition that they are co-opting your brand in an unseen way to change user perception. That's a separate question. And I imagine, I'm almost surprised I haven't, like that hasn't come more to the fore because it is such a complex place. In the real world, what's far more useful is simply if that happens, reporting it to the search provider, right? I mean, a lot of these things aren't legal cases, it's reported to the search provider, they'll stop it. Somebody can try buying it again, you can go to whoever's buying that ad and say, hey, that's not okay. So that brings us to everything else between nominative use, which is always okay, and infringement, which is not okay, but until somebody complains, you can get away with it, is everything else. So there's no simple rule to say if any specific use is infringing or not. You need to look at the specific place they're using it. You need to look at the whole webpage or the video that somebody's using it within. You need to look at, are they using part of your mark? Are they using it in a way that's talking about products? Or are they using it in a way that's talking about how they, you know, maybe they use your product and it really killed their business process and they thought it was bad. That's not a problem. You have to look at each particular thing. Now, that's not to say that you can't ask someone if you think someone is improperly using your brand. You can certainly ask them to change and that's something we need to do more often. Or you see somebody else using your brand in a way that you feel hurts you, ask them to change. Now, they don't have to, right? But in a lot of cases they will if they value their reputation, especially with Apache products because we have a pretty good reputation. And really, there is a simple answer. I should have thought of this earlier. There's a simple answer for telling you whether or not something is an infringement. It depends. I can use that answer for almost any time you come to me saying, is it okay if I say Apache Houp does blah? It depends. I'm not actually a lawyer. But we have a game for that. Let's play the game since at the end of the day I wanna make sure everybody stays awake. We're gonna play the game, spot the lawyers. So this game lets us see who in the room is secretly a lawyer because they are gonna start twitching over the next few slides, okay? So watch your fellow attendees here, okay? So trademarks are just like copyrights and the lawyers will be twitching. So we don't have any lawyers here today because when you register either one with either the copyright office or the trademark office you can win more compensation if you actually have a lawsuit and sue successfully and say damages are done. So if you have registration you can actually get a lot of money. If you don't, well, you can sue but you won't really get damages. So there are a lot of like, right? Trademarks are also just like patents. See, they're all connected because they both have to have a function. You can only patent an invention if it does something. It has to have a process. There has to be a purpose except for design patents, but let's not talk about those, those are weird. Trademarks only have value if used in commerce. You can talk about my super thing in my pocket and it's awesome and it's great unless you actually ever provide it as a product that somebody else could buy or download. Now you don't have, open source can have trademarks. You don't have to have pay for a product that you trademark. But if you never use it in commerce it's not a trademark. So no, really, the three things are not at all alike and any of the, well, I don't even wanna say intellectual property because that's a kind of not very good description of the three kinds of property. But they're not at all alike but it's a good way to find the lawyers. So registered trademarks. So there's a little R, it's registered and there's a little TM which means it's not registered. They're both important but they're different. In the US and Canada if you are using your name for your product that's your trademark and it still has value even though some people will think it doesn't. If you register your trademark either in the US or in any other country or in Europe, the EU has its own registry it takes several months. Once that happens you have significantly more rights to preventing somebody else from using your name. In the US it's fairly simple. You fill out an application, it's a few hundred dollars. It still takes six months because that's how they work. When you do a trademark search which a lot of commercial companies will do, the lawyers will do an exhaustive search saying could there possibly be anybody we know of existingly who would conflict with his name before we try and register it. You don't actually need to do that. It certainly helps in terms of understanding if there's somebody else who you might be stepping in the toes of but we don't need to do that. Any Apache project that would like to register their name I will try and help them do that. The ASF owns all trademarks on behalf of our project so I'm happy to help register your name. There's a link here, just send me a simple question. When you do register, you register in specific classes so a registration has to be in the right class. Class nine is scientific instruments and surveying materials and a whole bunch of other things and software products, which is kind of interesting. Class 32 is beer, fruit juice, mineral water. Class 33 is alcoholic beverages but not beer. I always found an interesting distinction. 42 is services related to computers. Now, legally the classes don't actually matter in terms of determining likelihood of confusion. They actually, it's part of the registration process but it's not actually legally part of the confusion test but in reality if you are providing a software product here, download this and I'm saying I can tell you how to use so and so. They're clearly different functionalities. They're clearly different consumers. Consumers not gonna confuse one for the other because they're looking for a different kind of thing. So trademarks do only tend to apply for products that have similar functionalities. So you can indeed have a super thing command line editor and also have a super thing tax product, tax preparation software because any consumer would know if they got to the wrong website. I don't want that crazy. I don't understand what command line arguments are. I want my taxes. Oh, I want this one. Yeah, so TurboTax indeed offers both a product that you can buy in a box still and an online service that just everything on the website. Yes, those are legally, those are separate trademarks. So one is a, yes, and that's, they probably pay 10 times that because they probably register both as, yeah. From the open source perspective, well, so why would we want to register because it prevents problems. It's like, for open source projects, it's like an insurance policy. So if you have that, now, importantly, make the application you need to wait until it gets through the whole process. After your registration is issued, which only comes from a national registry, then you should switch your TM to an R. Don't do it beforehand because if the examiner sees it, they'll complain. Why is it important? Because if you do this, then people will notice. So there are really two reasons to register. One is the obvious one is that if somebody does infringe and you want to go after them, you say, hey, I have this registered trademark. See, there's a little R, here's my registration number. If you, in any respectable open source product, if you do that to some vendor, they will eventually fix the problem. Because at some point, even if they want to push back, that email will go through their business and at some point will hit a lawyer. And the lawyer will say, huh, they claim it's registered. They'll look it up. They'll see the registration number. And the lawyer will say, don't fight this. Give it up. Period. The other reason that having registration is important is lawyers and marketers tend to do searches before they launch product campaigns. They tend to do something like a trademark search. And if they see when you have a registration, it's in this giant database that they will look at. So they will not, they won't start a campaign that infringes because they'll see it ahead of time. So those are both really important reasons to have the registration. Question on this? Yeah. Okay, so when you're applying for a registration, given that it takes a long time, typically in the U.S., it's four to six months, can you submit several applications that are, in case there's a problem with one, the other one will get through. No. You obviously need to ask your lawyer that question, but I would say no. Because typically in the U.S., most other countries are similar, although the details are different. In the U.S., you submit the application, they sort of check are all the things there, eventually an examiner is assigned who then checks to make sure that the way you have specified things matches their criteria. And then they do a search, they essentially do a trademark search of existing registered marks of any that could be similar. And at that point, if they find an issue, they will have an office action. So if they think there's a problem with your application, they'll stop it. They'll send your lawyers a formal thing saying, we believe this may conflict, explain to us why it does not. And then your lawyer's right back. So that process is how you would then change to adapt that. And typically what you do is sometimes you reduce your claim of goods, right? You say, well, we don't make database and downloadable software and online software and so on. We only make database software. Sometimes you have to change the actual mark and sometimes it's gonna get rejected so you create a new application. So one bit of feedback I sometimes hear is if we registered, do we have to do more work? Well, there is a duty to police, which some people tend to worry about. But if we're registered, we have to suddenly do all this policing work. Well, especially if you talk to your lawyers, they're gonna tell you about how you have to do all this stuff and sign up for a trademark watch list and all that stuff. Yeah, no. There's no specific law or process that defines the minimum amount of policing you have to do. Now, if you don't police, that is, if you don't address other people's improper uses of your mark, eventually that's gonna weaken your legal ability to do so. But in the real world for our kind of projects, doesn't matter that much. Now, if there are people doing things egregiously bad, then yes, you should work on it because otherwise users are gonna not see your thing, they're gonna see something else to think, right? For the practical reason. The legal reasons are not as important for open source projects. What's actually as important as thinking about policing is making sure you use your own marks consistently. So I was talking to one lawyer who actually said, like, they get open source. Like, well, what really is important? They're like, the most important thing is on your homepage and on your download page, use your trademark appropriately with a TM or an R, uses an adjective and say, download Apache Flink software here, Apache Flink with a TM. That is the most important thing because people who read it see it and say, oh, that's your brand. And anytime there's a question later and a lawyer reads it, first thing a lawyer will do is, did they actually treat it like a trademark? Yes. Okay, well, maybe we have to pay attention. So that's actually, it's far more important that we as open source projects display ourselves well, which just means it's really just thinking about your homepage and your download page. The registry web presence, yes, it would be great, but I know we don't always have time in open source for all the documentation. So how could you take action? So this is both focused on business leaders who want to work better with open source as well as Apache projects that I hope are doing these things by using the name appropriately and coming to me to request registering their name. First one is having a trademark policy. So if you're thinking about a startup or thinking about forking something and doing your own new name, have a policy for your brand. Apache has one, it applies to all projects. It's off of this link here. A really important thing, I think a lot of companies may not have, but companies that work in the open source area, well, Alan's company here does, if you're a company, have a policy of how you will use open source trademarks. You probably have a policy of how your engineers are allowed to contribute code. If you don't, you should. But also for your marketers, have a policy. How do you treat these open source things? You want to jump on the latest open source bandwagon that's hot. Are you going to use their branding at all or not? Are you just going to only use your branding? Hopefully you're also respecting the open source branding, but having a policy of how you'll do that, and especially if you can publish that and let the open source community know, yes, we respect you. We want to partner with you. How can we do that? Just open up the communication rather than just letting your marketers go off, because it's really important to respect open source trademarks. I'll apologize to those of you here in the front row. I don't need to tell you this because you came to ApacheCon, but there are a lot of other business leaders that do not completely get this. Think about every open source project as a separate vendor in a space and how would you treat their brands? Because we may not, we open source geeks and disorganized projects may not appear the same way, but we care about our names just as much as any other vendor does. And in particular, when there's a problem, when we come to a company to complain, I have been, I've done that, and I've been sent to talk to a lawyer. And I've now learned that there's no point. This is not, if a company is misusing an Apache brand, it's not a legal question. It's a business question, because if that business is actually using our software, they want to be able to participate in our communities. And if I can explain that to their business leader, they'll say, oh yeah, I'm sorry, totally, we'll fix that. If I talk to their lawyer, they don't care about that. They don't care about the reputation about the fact that their business runs on five Apache projects. So it's really important here as an open source project to understand that perspective, that these companies, we may not have marketing departments to fight back, but these companies do need to respect the software that they're using in terms of the branding and the reputation of the community. And of course, every Apache project, I'm here to help, along with the ASF lawyers. Speaking of lawyers, the number one rule, which I'll just put here at the end, is avoid court. You never want to go to court for lawsuits, for trademarks. Sometimes people say, oh, this company's doing a horrible thing, and yes, I checked, it's really horrible, let's send them a C and D. No, never the first step to go to legal issues. The first step is always, if somebody truly is badly misusing your project name, is to send them one of the letters, I have a template, I should have a link here. Apache projects, we have a template for saying, hey, we're an Apache project, this is our trademark, we believe you're misusing it, please, you need to stop. Because a lot of the time, that works. They're like, the right product manager says, oh, sorry, yeah, we're wrong, and they'll fix it. If that doesn't work, then I can send a letter, and I'll sign it with my title. And that tends to get to a higher level of management, who will say, oh, this relationship with Apache is important, so we'll stop. We don't need to involve lawyers. Especially for open source communities who don't have, one of the things that's a disparity is, commercial companies, even smaller ones, have a lawyer on staff. They're used to that. They have a marketing person who work as a part of a team. Open source communities sometimes have a marketing person, but it's a distributed community. There's no direct connection. So thinking about these issues, thinking about, wow, if somebody's launched this campaign over there, we need to address it. In a company, it's a very simple set of steps to get action. In an open source community, it's not as obvious. So the action tends to come much later than some poorly done campaign comes up. And that's gonna be an issue for a while. Because the later that you wait to address something, the harder it is for the other party to make changes. And one thing is that I say to some companies is open source talent. I was at one conference where all the booze, half the booze were partly recruiting. They're like, yes, you want to work for us and here's why we were cool because we participate here. Well, if you want open source people to work for you, then you need to respect their work. Whether it's some other open source project or you may want this hot engineer and they realized you didn't treat their project from five years ago very well. So this is gonna matter in the long term in terms of this is how software works. We expect that open source projects get the same respect as vendors. If you want to do something, if you don't want to use your name, that's great. If you do use your name, give us the credit. That's all we ask. And that's really the final lesson is open source works when you can take value from our technology. That's why we do it. That's the maintenance benefit, the innovation benefit of everybody, all these competitors saying, okay, I'll throw this one little bit in together. If we didn't get value from it, we wouldn't do it. And all open source wants back in return is to give credit. We want credit for the work we did. And at Apache, we're happy if you go make millions of dollars on top of our stuff and we have plenty of examples that do that. Just along the way, if you're using any of our names, give us the credit for the part we built. That's what we wanna ask. And questions and answers. So we've already taken a few questions. We're just about the end of time I don't know how long the video will run. But I do have a couple related to your question earlier. There are two websites that help explain trademark law and open source in a way that's geared to us, not to lawyers. So there's one called the Model Trademark Guidelines, which I'm kinda surprised it hasn't gotten noticed much. Essentially, a lawyer and a small group of people who get open source essentially wrote a complete trademark policy. It says, you know, this policy applies to dollar sign trademark name. And we are an open source project called dollar sign project name, right? You can just replace it, copy the whole thing, replace things, have a great policy. And it makes sense for open source groups. Another one that helps explain some of the questions of what does it really mean? Why would you do this is fosmarks.org. So another set of four lawyers who get open source, who really do, wrote a very personable thing saying, hey, you've got this new startup and you've come up with a great new name and you wanna have, you wanna protect your name, you think you should do something about it? What should you think about? And that leads through a bunch of steps of we should use the name consistently, we should call a trademark, eventually we should register it and then what do we do if we have problems? So that's actually a very good resource. Now it's just trademarks, it doesn't deal with copyrights or patents, but it's, that's a very approachable explanation. And of course, a resources link here. So Apache projects, of course, if you're participating in an Apache project, which you probably are, we have our trademark info site map here. So at the apache.org website, I have so many different documents that explain social media guidelines and use in services or use in event name branding that I simply wrote a custom site map for all of the things. So everything you need to know about trademarks or questions you might have for Apache projects or using Apache projects is linked to from here. No, really, everything is linked to from here. So if you have a question that's not answered here, then come let me know and ask trademarks at apache.org. And that is all we have time for tonight. So thank you. Thanks, have a good night.