[DRE-maint] Bug#959981: Trademark issues with Chef/Cinc package included in Debian

[Antonio Terceiro]

Package: chef
Version: 15.8.25.3.gcf41df6a2-6
Severity: serious
X-Debbugs-CC: lance at osuosl.org, maintainers at cinc.sh, benny at chef.io

----- Forwarded message from Lance Albertson <lance at osuosl.org> -----

Date: Thu, 7 May 2020 11:40:38 -0700
From: Lance Albertson <lance at osuosl.org>
To: pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org, terceiro at debian.org, ubuntu-motu at lists.ubuntu.com
Cc: maintainers at cinc.sh, benny at chef.io
Subject: Trademark concerns with Chef/Cinc package included in Debian and Ubuntu
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Message-ID: <CAORfjXT71AcpczbbLbwushH9+YXgFJQR639utLYX+5tKHusXFA at mail.gmail.com>

All,

I'm a member of the Cinc Project [1] which rebuilds and rebrands various
Chef projects to comply with Chef Trademark Policy [2]. We have worked
closely with Chef to ensure Cinc Client complies with this policy.

A member of our community notified us today that it appears that Ubuntu [3]
and Debian [4] are both including a package called "chef" which seems to
pull in the Cinc source code but doesn't fully comply with the Chef
Trademark Policy. We are concerned that this use of the Cinc Client in the
manner it's currently presented will create an issue for us and you in the
future unless this gets resolved quickly.

Specifically, we are concerned with the following:

1. The package name should be cinc and not chef as Chef is trademarked and
also causes users to think they are installing Chef when they are
installing Cinc
2. The package should have proper attributions to include the Cinc Project
including pointing any issues related to the package to our issue page, and
not Chef
2. Running "chef-client" (or other similar commands) does not tell the user
that it's actually using Cinc Client as our package does properly
3. All of the trademark renaming we did in our Cinc Client distribution
seems to have been removed and retains all of the Chef related paths (i.e.
/etc/chef when it should be /etc/cinc). This will cause confusion for users
who are expecting Cinc.

We would like to work with the Debian/Ubuntu maintainers to ensure you're
following compliance and also ensuring our distribution works well on
Debian/Ubuntu. However we also want to ensure you don't get into any legal
trouble with Chef. I am sure most of these changes weren't done
intentionally and was a mistake.

Feel free to reach out to us via the #community-distros channel on the Chef
Community Slack, or you can reach me directly via IRC on Freenode as
"Ramereth".  I've also cc'd Benny Vasquez who is a community manager at
Chef who can answer any questions relating to this and provide any
additional feedback.

Thanks!

[1] https://cinc.sh/
[2] https://www.chef.io/trademark-policy/
[3] https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/chef
[4] https://packages.debian.org/sid/chef

-- 
Lance Albertson
Director
Oregon State University | Open Source Lab

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