That’s just weird. Anyone can see that it’s logical to name plugins in ANY plugin architecture like “<AppWithPluginArchitecture>-<PluginName>-plugin”. Forcing people to reverse that is confusing. Consider “eclipse-maven-plugin” and “maven-eclipse-plugin”. It’s obvious to anyone aware of that convention that the first is a plugin for Eclipse that supports maven (even if the main plugin that does this is named differently), and the second is a plugin for Maven that supports Eclipse. They want you to name your plugin “jaxb2-maven-plugin”, so I guess that’s a plugin for jaxb2 that supports Maven, right? :)
Whether a plugin is “officially supported” should be determined more by its group id than the artifact id. When artifact ids conflict, that’s your only choice.
From: aleksei.valikov_at_gmail.com [mailto:aleksei.valikov_at_gmail.com] On Behalf Of Aleksei Valikov
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 4:13 AM
To: users_at_jaxb.java.net
Subject: maven-jaxb2-plugin to renamed due to a trademark/naming convention issue with Apache
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