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Historical records of public operations summaries of the ASF Trademarks Committee. ** Contents ** See Also: [Trademark Resources Site Map][resources]. {: .pull-right style="float:right; border-style:ridge; width:200px; padding:5px; margin:5px" } [TOC] ## Brand Management Monthly Reports To The Board Formally published reports from Brand Management are included in the [official board meeting minutes](https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Brand_Management) of the ASF. ## Q2 Operations Summary - December 2017 (FY 2018) The fall quarter in the Northern Hemisphere brings a regular uptick in requests and questions, which continues to require effort to provide timely and complete answers to questioners, especially outside parties. We've also seen a large uptick in requests to create non-computer merchandise (shirts, giveaways, etc.) using Apache brands. Most of these requests are a good way to help promote awareness of Apache projects and their contributors, and are well in line with our policy: [https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/merchandise](https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/merchandise) While a few Apache project PMCs continue to actively monitor uses of their brand and raise issues appropriately, the rapid growth in popular projects, both in the big data space and elsewhere, continues to be an issue with our capacity to provide knowledgeable and timely responses to questions. We will be investigating new ways to invest in our ability to provide the branding and trademark services that our many Apache projects deserve. All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for Open Source as well as brand management are published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them - please review our complete site map: [http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources](http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources) On the registration front, we continue to work with counsel to process renewals and registrations for projects. While most are straightforward, some are complex, and require a significant amount of both our limited volunteer officer time as well as our counsel's time. As Apache projects power more of the internet every day, we look to the companies that profit from Apache software products to fully respect Apache brands. We very much appreciate the companies that pass on their **completed** trademark registrations along with the codebases they donate to the Apache Incubator. Having existing registrations makes managing trademarks much simpler for the ASF. While many companies continue to give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance. Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects. Please [contact the Apache Brand Management team][contactus] with your questions or suggestions! > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ## Q1 Operations Summary - September 2017 (FY 2018) The summer quarter continues to be traditionally quiet in terms of trademark questions and requests, although we continue to get new kinds of questions coming in with some regularity. Some Apache project PMCs now have experience implementing our trademark policies and have been doing a great job answering basic questions themselves directly with third parties, which is great to see. However as our number of projects grow, so do the number of questions or issues overall which continues to tax our small pool of Brand Management volunteers with broad experience. All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for Open Source as well as brand management is published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them - please review our complete site map: [http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources](http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources) On the registration front, we have come upon our first large set of trademark registration renewals and maintenance paperwork. Although our legal counsel handles all the actual paperwork with various national trademark registries, this is still an ongoing effort for our volunteer Brand Management team to validate continuing use of these marks - as well as the financial costs for registry fees. In almost all cases we will continue to maintain existing registrations for projects. We continue to have some projects request new registrations as well, and are successfully negotiating some coexistence agreements with potentially similar software brands in the marketplace as well. As more Apache brands and projects power more business every year, we continue to look to the companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. We very much appreciate the companies that pass on their trademark registrations with incoming donations of podlings joining the Incubator. Having existing registrations makes the trademark management process simpler for the ASF. While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to --or have started to-- take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance. Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects. Please [contact the Apache Brand Management team][contactus] with your questions or suggestions! > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ## Annual Report June 2017 (FY 2017) #### Operational Trends We continues to field both general questions and permissions requests for a wide variety of brand uses. Along with questions about using Apache project marks in unusual places, including television, movies, and a variety of academic papers and vendor marketing, we've had questions about the applicability of the APACHE (R) trademark to licenses themselves. While we have the expertise to help answer these questions, it is still difficult to keep all our operations proceeding speedily while relying solely on volunteers for all work that doesn't directly require counsel. Some projects continue to do a good job of policing and addressing potential misuses of their brands, and the strength of the Apache brand continues to get good results when we request the trademark credit our volunteer communities deserve. #### New Policy Initiatives Part of the Brand Management Committee has discussed and written new policies to clarify proper uses of Apache brands and to address many new permissions requests for apparel featuring Apache project brands. While the ASF is firmly committed to providing free access to our source code and all resources, we are happy to allow respectful vendors to use selected Apache trademarks on non-computer related goods, like apparel, stickers, and the like. These uses can both publicize project brands as well as encourage a sense of community for Apache project fans. Free giveaways are generally fine, and the ASF now has a policy for licensing specific brands to apparel or sticker companies with a clear license and profit sharing arrangement. - [See the new Apache Non-Software Merchandise Branding Policy](https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/merchandise) Our new [Third Party Services Naming Branding Policy](https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/services) clarifies the use of Apache brands in services, for example the many cloud or hosting providers who offer services around Apache software products. In addition, a greatly expanded [Apache Product Name Usage Guide](https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/guide) will help marketers and technologists alike better refer to Apache communities and the software products they produce. #### Statistics And Registrations With several guides for how Apache project communities can improve their brands, better attract new contributors, and register their project name as a trademark, we offer comprehensive advice for all Apache projects and podlings. We at Brand Management are happy to work with all Apache projects to answer questions or submit registration applications, but it's still up to the individual Apache communities to take the first step and request registration. In the past year, 11 new projects have made trademark applications in the US and other countries, 5 projects have had their registrations granted, and two incoming podlings have had their existing trademark registrations transferred to the ASF as part of their graduation to top level project status. Please [contact the Apache Brand Management team][contactus] with your questions or suggestions! > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ### Q3 Operations Summary: March 2017 (FY 2017) Over the past few years, the Brand Management committee has been working on a comprehensive set of trademark policies and procedures to help our volunteer-run communities best protect their shared brand of Apache project independence. During the holiday lull at the end of the year, we've worked on drafting policies for use of Apache brands in services and hosting, as well as detailed policies for producing merchandise (apparel, stickers, and non-computer goods) using any Apache project's names or logos. This is timely, as a number of apparel vendors have approached us recently for licensing agreements. These products can both provide a way for people to show support for Apache projects, as well as donations of profits from the vendors. All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for Open Source as well as brand management is published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources On the registration front, we are facing more potential conflicts with the few projects that request registrations than in the past. The limitations of having a volunteer-run organization with nearly 200 active projects means that managing which registrations to fight for is still a complex problem to work through. As more Apache brands and projects power more business every year, we look to the many companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. We very much appreciate the companies that pass on their trademark registrations with incoming donations of podlings joining the Incubator. Having existing registrations makes the trademark management process simpler for the ASF. While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to --or have started to-- take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance. Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects. Please [contact the Apache Brand Management team][contactus] with your questions or suggestions! > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ### Q2 Operations Summary - December 2016 (FY 2017) The ASF continues to be at the forefront of what's really a new kind of organization, where our independently governed and distributed volunteer communities are in charge of managing not just their technologies and communities, but their trademarks and their whole brand and presence in the larger world. We continue to build new educational materials to help our highly technical communities understand the larger implications of managing the brand and outward impact of their projects, including proper trademark maintenance. The ASF is seen as a leader in trademark and brand policies, and our example is helping other FOSS communities as well as companies better understand how we can work together fairly and productively. Our community-focused education and policy materials are the best available, and we recently expanded to provide a more generic module on Practical Trademark Law for FOSS projects. We continue to work on improving education and mentoring for projects to ensure they understand how to best maintain their independent brand and image. All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for open source as well as brand management is published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources On the registration front, we continue to get some projects who request registration of names or beloved logos in the US and internationally. We continue to exercise financial care with our budget by working with the relevant project communities to detail why registration is important for them to attract new project contributors around the world. With the continued rise of prominent Apache brands and projects that power more business every year, we look to the many companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to --or have started to-- take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance. Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects. The Apache Brand Management team welcomes your questions on our private email list: trademarks@apache.org > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ### Q1 Operations Summary - September 2016 (FY 2017) Our Foundation-wide educational and policy improvement work continues to pay off, as more Apache projects are getting organized about maintaining and promoting their brands in a more organized fashion. Some projects are continuing work on their own detailed how-to guides for companies that want to *properly* use valuable Apache brands as part of their products or Web presences. However the rapid growth in new projects in the Incubator means that more help spreading the education to new communities is still needed. Our detailed list of resources, both Apache policies as well as pointers to other valuable open source branding guidelines and information is improving our ability to respond, as seen by the more detailed questions we get from third parties, as well as by the ability of some experienced projects to handle brand enforcement more independently. http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources While open source and the project communities are well understood in industry these days, open source *governance* and brand management are becoming more important topics. The ASF is seen as a leader in governance and brand policing, and our example is helping other FOSS communities as well as companies better understand how we can work together fairly and productively. On the registration front, we continue to get some projects who request registration of names or beloved logos in the US and internationally. We continue to exercise financial care with our budget by working with the relevant project communities to detail why registration is important for them to attract new project contributors around the world. With the continued rise of prominent Apache brands and projects that power more business every year, we look to the many companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to - or have started to - take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands. Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF and all Apache projects. You can always ask the Apache Brand Management team private questions at trademarks@apache.org > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ## Annual Report - June 2016 (FY 2016) While Foundation-wide educational and policy improvement work continues, we are still finding communities that need more help in reviewing their brand and presence, and in keeping a focus on reviewing uses of their brand by vendors. While many companies support Apache projects in a variety of ways, new brand misuses continue to crop up across various Apache projects that need to be dealt with. Our detailed list of resources, both Apache policies as well as pointers to other valuable Open Source branding guidelines and information is continuing to improve with more detailed process guides for community brand management. http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources Our VP, Brand Management gave an expanded community branding talk at ApacheCon in Vancouver with great feedback, showing the benefits of a better brand and Website in terms of attracting new contributors. They were also an invited keynote speaker at the FLOSS Community Metrics conference, as well as leading several Community Leadership SummIt unconference sessions on community-led branding and governance topics. A BOF at OSCON Austin also gave another opportunity to showcase how Apache projects think about their brands to many other FOSS communities. The feedback from these sessions was positive, and shows a clear need for more education and help for FOSS communities around the ecosystem. While licensing is well understood, and community governance has plenty of leaders across the software world, brand management and trademark knowledge is still lacking in many communities. The ASF is clearly serving as a leader in this space through our examples and materials. With the rise of both prominent Apache brands as well as a number of other major movements showcasing how important vendor neutral Open Source project branding can be, we also welcome feedback from the many organizations that both use Apache software to power their business, as well as extend our thanks to those who contribute code to our projects and those who respect Apache brands. You can always ask the Brand Management team private questions at: trademarks@apache.org > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ### Q3 Operations Summary - March 2016 (FY 2016) Our Foundation-wide educational and policy improvement work continues to pay off, as more Apache projects are getting organized about maintaining and promoting their brands in a more organized fashion. There is still a wide variety of experience and attention about proper branding and policing across our diverse volunteer communities, several projects are working on their own detailed how-to guides for companies that want to *properly* use valuable Apache brands as part of their products or web presences. Our detailed list of resources, both Apache policies as well as pointers to other valuable open source branding guidelines and information is improving our ability to respond, as seen by the more detailed questions we get from third parties, as well as by the ability of some projects to handle brand enforcement more independently. http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources While open source and the project communities are well understood in industry these days, open source *governance* and brand management are becoming more important topics. The ASF is often seen as a leader in governance and brand policing, both due to our strong history of independent governance as well as from our wide variety of popular projects spanning all software technologies. We will continue to provide more education and guidance for our projects, as well as improving and smoothing relations with vendors using our brands to ensure that our volunteer project communities always get the credit they deserve for building Apache software. On the registration front, our projects are really beginning to respond, and many more projects are requesting both US registrations, as well as a variety of international registrations; including in one case a request to register a particularly detailed project logo. We continue to exercise financial care with our budget by working with the relevant project communities to detail why registration is important for them to attract new project contributors around the world. With the rise of both prominent Apache brands as well as a number of other major movements showcasing how important vendor neutral open source project branding can be, we also welcome feedback from the many organizations that both use Apache software to power their business, as well as extend our thanks to those who contribute code to our projects. > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ### Q2 Operations Summary - December 2016 (FY 2016) The brand management team continues to work on educational materials to help promote our many Apache project brands, as well as showing our volunteer communities effective ways to police third party use of Apache project brands. We now have a detailed list of trademark and branding resources available for our communities as well as vendors who work with Apache projects: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources Along with presenting on trademark basics at ApacheCon conferences, our VP of Brand Management was invited to speak on a panel discussion about community owned trademarks at Columbia Law School, at SFLC's annual conference. Improving awareness of the importance of trademarks to our communities as well as to the Foundation is critical in ensuring long-lived and widely-contributed to software projects. We are also continuing to seek US trademark registrations for projects that ask for one, as well as improving our ability to register selected Apache project brands in other countries with our limited budget. > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management ## Annual Report - June 2015 (summary FY 2015) The Apache(R) brand holds a unique position in the software world, in that it is associated with communities and technologies in a wide variety of industries. Apache software technology powers webservers, office suites, high performance search engines, a full stack of software development tools, geospatial work, and more than a dozen different big data technologies, including Apache Hadoop(R). Similarly, Apache communities are often used as models for open source project behavior and bylaws by companies and other foundations alike. A key driver for innovation within Apache projects is the *independent* community governance model that the ASF provides. Part of the Apache Way and a requirement for all Apache projects is that they must govern their affairs independently of commercial influence. This ensures that project contributors are creating software for the public good, and not just for specific vendors. Independent project governance - which includes allowing new contributors a say in the project direction going forward - ensures that every company and individual feels comfortable donating their time and code to any Apache project. As projects like Apache Hadoop are now powering whole industries, the pressures from various software companies to be the market leader grow. To ensure Apache projects are seen as independent, the ASF owns all project trademarks on behalf of our project communities. As a non-profit, we recognize the importance and value of the brands and good reputations that our volunteer communities have built, and the ASF will defend all of our community brands. To ensure that Apache project brands are respected, the ASF's Trademarks Committee provides assistance and education to all Apache projects for how to display their trademarks, as well as how to deal with third parties using Apache brands. Similarly, we have worked directly with a large number of companies who use Apache brands in their marketing to ensure that Apache trademarks are respected. While the Apache Trademark Policy allows specific uses of Apache brands by third parties, it still clearly shows the ASF's ownership of and defense of our project trademarks. Similarly, the Trademarks Committee works with the Apache Incubator to vet all incoming project names to the ASF before they become official top level projects; we have reviewed 28 new project names in the past year. The ASF also provides US and some international trademark registrations for selected Apache projects. While both DLAPiper and the Software Freedom Law Center provide pro bono legal advice, we rely on our budget to pay for trademark registration fees. Being able to register select Apache project trademarks greatly eases the process of policing use of those marks, freeing our community volunteers up to go back working on all the great code they produce. As we provide better education on the importance of defending Apache brands to our communities, many more PMCs are requesting registration of their project brands. Starting with over 40 registrations for 8 different projects, in the past year several key applications for our APACHE brand internationally have finalized, and we have submitted 10 new project registration applications, and have great interest from many more PMCs who wish to register their product names. > Shane Curcuru, Vice President ASF Brand Management [resources]: https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources [contactus]: https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact