Hi,
As many of you probably know, I develop and maintain the
maven-jaxb2-plugin. I am facing a trademark/naming convention issue with
Apache and I'd appreciate an advice on that.
I have started my project almost 8 years ago and took the name
maven-jaxb2-plugin as it seemed to be _the_ right convention back then.
Few years later Apache estabinished the some-maven-plugin convention for
non-Apache plugins. This is how they define it here:
http://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-development.html
*You will typically name your plugin <yourplugin>-maven-plugin.*
*Calling it maven-<yourplugin>-plugin (note "Maven" is at the beginning of
the plugin name) is strongly discouraged since it's a reserved naming
pattern for official Apache Maven plugins maintained by the Apache Maven
team with groupId org.apache.maven.plugins. Using this naming pattern is an
infringement of the Apache Maven Trademark.*
This became a warning during the build around three years ago. My plugin
was ~5 years old back then, with an already established user base etc. I
did not want to rename. This was a mistake, but it is a mistake already
made.
I also think I haven't seen this warning for the long time as there was no
need to update the versions of Maven libraries I used
Now an Apache committer, also a user of my plugin tried to clarified the
legal terms of this naming. Unfortunately, Apache seems to have a very
strict position on the issue. Please check this message:
http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@maven.apache.org/msg102491.html
And the further discussion.
So in the current situation, using the maven-jaxb2-plugin further on, I am
* facing a threat of cease-and-desist letter and
* a probability that my plugin will stop working/compiling any time soon.
I would not speculate on whether this trademark infringement thing is
legally sound or not. It does not matter. They're an organisation, I'm a
private person. I can't fight them. An even if the legal threat is unsound,
they can easily shut down my plugin technically in any next version of
Maven.
So the thing is that I have no other choice as to rename my plugin.
I have not yet desided on the name. The first choice would be
jaxb2-maven-plugin, but there is already another Maven plugin under that
name, from Codehaus. Yes, sure, groupId is different but people will mix
them up, definitely.
Any other name will disconnect my plugin from its longstanding history even
more. This will hurt my user base. I don't want this.
Merging the projects is probably not an option.
So my options are:
* rename to jaxb2-maven-plugin or
* rename to something else
I do not know what to do and would really appreciate opinions and advice.
(I'm not talking legal advice of any kind, more common sense community
advice.)
Best wishes,
Alexey