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

[Lance Albertson]

I think removing it from Debian is the safe way to go currently. If you
want assistance with how we build Cinc and how it could be adapted for
Debian let me know. Also if there are any changes we can make on our end to
make it easier.

Thanks-

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 2:14 PM Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at debian.org> wrote:

> 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.
>


-- 
Lance Albertson
Director
Oregon State University | Open Source Lab
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/attachments/20200507/b3e19bff/attachment.html>