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

[Antonio Terceiro]

Hello,

This is my attemp at a more detailed response after sleeping on it.

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 11:40:38AM -0700, Lance Albertson 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

Well other packages depend on chef packages by name, so renaming the
package might be tricky.

> 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 Chef2
> 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

Fair enough.

> 3. All of the trademark renaming we did in our Cinc Client distribution
> seems to have been removed and

Yes, I got the source from the git repository directly and missed the
"patching" process you do to make releases. Not making source releases
makes downstream work harder than it should be.

> 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.

For fresh installs that should not be a problem.

How do you suggest to handle upgrades? If a user of Debian 10 (released
before this new Trademark Policy) upgrades, should /etc/chef be renamed
to /etc/cinc? Or will cinc still use that for backwards compatibility?

Is there any other path change.

> 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.

Can you please provide a source release that has everything that is
needed? In particular, it would be useful to:

- make cinc-wrapper part of cinc itself instead of an implementation
  detail in the cinc-project/distribution/client repository

- publish a source release containing that alongside the binary packages
  you upload to http://downloads.cinc.sh/files/

I just sent a merge request that should do the later:
https://gitlab.com/cinc-project/distribution/client/-/merge_requests/37
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