First draft of Dask trademark policy based on discussion in #4

[seibert]

This is a summary of trademark policy that emerged in discussion in issue #4. The text assumes that ownership of the Dask trademark has been transferred to NumFOCUS, which is in progress.

The text is currently fairly minimal to only capture the specific nuance of how the Dask community wants its trademark to be used. Both the PSF Trademark Users Guide and the NumFOCUS Trademark Guidelines have a lot more generic boilerplate about how trademarks are used in general which we could add here if we want.

One TBD part of the document is where we want inquires about the trademark policy to go. Should they go to admin@numfocus.org or is there a Dask-specific email where questions should go?

(Marking this PR as draft until that last bit of text is figured out, but please add review comments now if you want.)

[mrocklin]

What's here is fine with me. Let's use the info@dask.org mailing list (if anyone wants to be added to this, let me know).

cc @jcrist @jrbourbeau @jacobtomlinson to get some other owner-eyes on this

[jrbourbeau]

This looks good to me too. Thanks for taking the time to write this up @seibert

[seibert]

Oh, I did have one additional question: The original discussion used the phrase "open source with a liberal license" which I replicated here, but I am not even sure what that means exactly. Does it still capture the intent if we use something more specific like "OSI-approved open source license"?

[mrocklin]

Oh, I did have one additional question: The original discussion used the phrase "open source with a liberal license" which I replicated here, but I am not even sure what that means exactly. Does it still capture the intent if we use something more specific like "OSI-approved open source license"?

I don't have a strong opinion here. I suggest exercising your best judgement on what you would like this to be that falls within that vague description.

[jacobtomlinson]

@mrocklin I note that the Coiled website says "Coiled: A Dask Company" which to me seems to be 99% the same as this disallowed example.

Should this document be updated to allow for your use of this? Or are you planning on changing your strapline?

[mrocklin]

Good question. I think it's useful for consumers to know that we are a company pretty much entirely focused around Dask. I'd say that today we are, de-facto, "The Dask Company" but aren't saying so, instead saying "A Dask Company" to make space potentially for others.

What do folks think?

[mrocklin]

Let's think about this a bit more. I think that there are a few outcomes:

1. We decide that "A Dask Company" in a tagline (rather than the company name) is relaxed and fine, like saying "NVIDIA Scale, powered by Dask"
2. We decide that "A Dask Company" in a tagline is not sufficiently relaxed, but that the trademark holder (NumFOCUS in the near future hopefully) grants a license for this use based on Coiled's current status as primary contributors. If Coiled steps down from this status then NumFOCUS (or some Dask subcommittee within NumFOCUS) retracts this license.
3. We decide that no one should do this for any reason

[jacobtomlinson]

I see your intent, but I think a common interpretation of "A Dask Company" would be "A company that is owned/endorsed by Dask".

Here are some real world examples of this usage:

• Taos: an IBM company - Taos is owned by IBM
• Ally.io, a Microsoft Company - Ally.io was purchased by Microsoft
• Verily: We are an Alphabet company focused on applying AI & data science - Verily is owned by Alphabet

Given this common interpretation I think that option 3 is the correct choice here. I personally would also be up for discussing option 2, but would suggest strong consensus between all owners.

Coiled also uses the tagline "Dask that just works" which I think fits much better with the trademark policy here.

[mrocklin]

I personally would also be up for discussing option 2, but would suggest strong consensus between all owners

I'd like to have this conversation. I think that it benefits users and reflects reality a bit. We happen to have a call in 20m. I'd like to reserve 5m at the end for this if you're game.

[fjetter]

This thread suggested a license that is "liberal enough to make it possible to upstream code snippets into dask itself".

I'm not a legal expert but I believe this excludes copyleft licenses which are included in the list of OSI approved licenses (e.g. all GPL licenses)

This specific topic was not further discussed in #4 but I would prefer not seeing any copyleft dask-* projects. How do other owners feel about this?

[seibert]

Ah, thanks for that context I missed in the original discussion. I can rephrase this line to capture that intent.

[seibert]

OK, I have corrected the wording.

[fjetter]

great, thank you! I'll leave this conversation unresolved for a while in case other folks want to chime in still.

[seibert]

I have also removed the draft status of this PR. When folks are happy with the pending discussion about company taglines vs. company names, I think this is ready to merge.