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

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 03:32:10PM -0400, benny Vasquez wrote:
> Thanks, Lance!
> 
> As he laid out, this packaged shipped as-is is a pretty serious violation
> of our trademarks, and we'd like to see it addressed as soon as humanly
> possible.
> 
> On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 2:40 PM Lance Albertson <lance at osuosl.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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

I am inclined to just remove chef from Debian as a way of fixing this.

Maybe I will package cinc from scratch. That would be easier if there
were proper source releases.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/attachments/20200507/fc6fea23/attachment.sig>