Request Sublicense for Jenkins Trademark Usage

[Evelyn Zhu]

Hi all,

First, I'd like to express my gratitude to Oleg. Thanks for helping us to determine whether we need to apply for a sublicense

I'm Evelyn from Websoft9 Inc. I'm reaching out to request sublicense for Jenkins trademark usage.

We're a provider of open source solutions. We offer Jenkins deployment solution, which contains pre-configured Jenkins and other software Jenkins required to run, such as Nginx. The sure thing is that we don't make any modifications to the software included. This Jenkins Stack is offered as open source project on GitHub to help users have an automatic installation for Jenkins.

Besides, we publish VM image for this Jenkins stack on platforms, like AWS( URL for reference) and Azure, to offer one-click install solution. We'd like to request sublicense to use the following product name that uses "Jenkins" in it:

"Jenkins on name of OS (eg: Ubuntu/ Amazon Linux) by Websoft9"

eg: Jenkins on Ubuntu by Websoft9

We'd make Trademark ownership notice on product page to avoid confusion, as shown below:

- Jenkins® is a registered trademark of Software in the Public Interest, Inc..
- Jenkins is licensed under the MIT License.

I’d appreciate a lot if we could gain the sublicense. If need more detailed information, please let me know.

Thanks for your attention to this request.

Best regards,

----------------

Evelyn

Business Development & Legal Affairs - Websoft9 Inc.

https://en.websoft9.com/

evely...@websoft9.com

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the follow-up. i will add the request to the tomorrow's Governance Meeting agenda. I also propose propose to discuss the generic naming patterns and see whether we could move forward towards adopting the Linux Foundation trademark usage rules and preapproved patterns: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage/

Regarding the request for "Jenkins on Ubuntu by Websoft9" and so on, it is a subject for discussion. Personally I would rather advice to consider the Linux Foundation naming patterns:

• <your product name> for <The Linux Foundation mark>
• <your product/company name> plug-in for <The Linux Foundation mark>
• <your product name> compatible with <The Linux Foundation mark>
• <your product name> for use with <The Linux Foundation mark>

Best regards,

Oleg

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hello Evelyn,

First of all, we would like to thank you for reaching out to the Jenkins community and bringing up the trademark topic in a good faith. We appreciate taking the high road in this topic, especially taking wide misusage of the trademark on public cloud marketplaces (we will be following up on that separately).

I would like to summarize the decisions we made at the yesterday's governance meeting:

• The current name of the referenced distribution is "Jenkins on Ubuntu". This name potentially leads to confusion, and it neither matches the previous precedents nor the approved patterns in the Linux Foundation guidelines. Based on that, we have voted against approving the current name.
• "Jenkins on Ubuntu by Websoft9" is considered acceptable use of the Jenkins trademark by the Governance Meeting. We are ready to approve this name, with a hard requirement to always use the full name on the marketplaces and in all related materials. It means that you will need to rename the packages on AWS/Azure to follow this pattern so that the full name is listed in the header.
  
• We would like to highlight that, in the case above, we approve only the Jenkins trademark. We do not make a decision on "Ubuntu" and we highly recommend that you clarify the trademark usage policy for it.

Please let us know whether you are fine with using "Jenkins on Ubuntu by Websoft9" and updating the marketplace page and other materials accordingly. As far as I can tell, the license attribution will also need to be updated to "The registered trademark Jenkins® is used pursuant to a sublicense from the Jenkins project and Software in the Public Interest, Inc." as stated in https://www.jenkins.io/project/governance/#attribution-for-sublicensees.

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev