Submariner trademark; need your help to cite examples of use in China

[Alan Clark]

While working with the LF on transferring the Submariner trademark(s) to the Linux Foundation, SUSE received a legal notice to cancel the Submariner mark in China.  It was sent to SUSE since the mark was filed by Rancher.  To support LF efforts to defend the Submariner trade mark we are looking for your help.  Unfortunately China has only given us a few days to build a response.  

It is recommend that we gather the following types of information to respond to the legal challenge:

--information from the project website
--information from the project's repositories, especially contributions from and downloads by individuals and companies in China
--information about and pictures from events related to the Submariner software, especially those held in China. (don't forget about presentations at Kubernetes forums)
--press coverage in China of the Submariner software
--promotional materials from Chinese companies who use or contribute to the Submariner software (e.g., a Chinese company website blog post about how it uses Submariner or even a listing showing they use Submariner).

Please send me the public information that you can find to support that list.  All evidence needs to be from the period March 21, 2021, through March 20, 2024.

I will collate everything and submit it to the LF team so that they can form a legal response.

Thanks,

-Alan Clark

SUSE

[Tom Pantelis]

Alan,

I can try to provide some info.  See in line.

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 4:43 PM 'Alan Clark' via submariner-dev <submari...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

While working with the LF on transferring the Submariner trademark(s) to the Linux Foundation, SUSE received a legal notice to cancel the Submariner mark in China.  It was sent to SUSE since the mark was filed by Rancher.  To support LF efforts to defend the Submariner trade mark we are looking for your help.  Unfortunately China has only given us a few days to build a response.  

It is recommend that we gather the following types of information to respond to the legal challenge:

--information from the project website

The documentation website is here: https://submariner.io/. Not sure what specific information you're looking for.

 

--information from the project's repositories, especially contributions from and downloads by individuals and companies in China

The repos are listed here: https://github.com/orgs/submariner-io/repositories. I'm not aware of nor recall any contributions from folks in China. 

 

--information about and pictures from events related to the Submariner software, especially those held in China. (don't forget about presentations at Kubernetes forums)

Events, conferences, blogs etc related to Submariner are listed here: https://submariner.io/other-resources/. Note the "Hybrid Cloud and Multicluster Service Discovery, KubeCon China" link.

[Stephen Kitt]

Hi Alan,

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 01:43:37PM -0700, 'Alan Clark' via submariner-dev wrote:
> --information from the project website
> --information from the project's repositories, especially contributions
> from and downloads by individuals and companies in China
> --information about and pictures from events related to the Submariner
> software, especially those held in China. (don't forget about presentations
> at Kubernetes forums)
> --press coverage in China of the Submariner software
> --promotional materials from Chinese companies who use or contribute to the
> Submariner software (e.g., a Chinese company website blog post about how it
> uses Submariner or even a listing showing they use Submariner).

This doesn’t quite fit in the above, but there is a fork of at least a
portion of Submariner, made by someone writing in Chinese:
<https://github.com/wangyd1988/admiral-inspur> and
<https://github.com/wangyd1988/lighthouse-inspur> (also at
<https://github.com/harper-huang/lighthouse-inspur>). They have made
changes to the projects since the forks, which indicates they are
actually doing something with it. The naming suggests this is related
to Inspur (the Chinese cloud computing and big data company) but I
don’t have any other evidence that they are using Submariner.

Regards,

--
Stephen Kitt
Senior Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat Application Networking

[Alan Clark]

This is looking good.  I am stuck in meetings most of today, so will look at the document late today or first thing tomorrow.

One paragraph that I would like to see added is a general 'world' view of the project.

- that it is part of CNCF, world wide audience, world wide contributors... that type of thing.

Thanks,

AlanClark

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:54 PM Daniel Farrell <dfar...@redhat.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 6:47 PM Daniel Farrell <dfar...@redhat.com> wrote:

Hello Alan,

Sorry about the trademark troubles. We'd be happy to help.

I've started a Google Doc we can use to collaborate. Feel free to comment/suggest/edit, all.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

We now have 21 examples of contributors who seem to live in China, as well as details of their contributions, in the GDoc.

I could keep digging, but I think that's likely enough to show our use of the Submariner trademark in China.

Please let me know if that data works for SUSE/CNCF.

Thanks,

Daniel

 

We've had many contributions from people living in China. We've also given a talk about Submariner in China, but that was in 2019.

Thanks,

Daniel

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 4:43 PM 'Alan Clark' via submariner-dev <submari...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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[Daniel Farrell]

Hello,

I think our Chinese trademark data document is in pretty good shape. Should we pass it on to the LF so they can work on their response?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

Thanks,

Daniel

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 11:54 AM Daniel Farrell <dfar...@redhat.com> wrote:

Sounds good. I added a first draft of a "global project" section, as well as Stephen's fork data and a section about Chinese-language media coverage.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

Thanks,

Daniel

[Daniel Farrell]

Hello Alan,

Sorry about the trademark troubles. We'd be happy to help.

I've started a Google Doc we can use to collaborate. Feel free to comment/suggest/edit, all.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

We've had many contributions from people living in China. We've also given a talk about Submariner in China, but that was in 2019.

Thanks,

Daniel

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 4:43 PM 'Alan Clark' via submariner-dev <submari...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

--

[Daniel Farrell]

Sounds good. I added a first draft of a "global project" section, as well as Stephen's fork data and a section about Chinese-language media coverage.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

Thanks,

Daniel

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 10:57 AM Alan Clark <acl...@suse.com> wrote:

[Daniel Farrell]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 6:47 PM Daniel Farrell <dfar...@redhat.com> wrote:

Hello Alan,

Sorry about the trademark troubles. We'd be happy to help.

I've started a Google Doc we can use to collaborate. Feel free to comment/suggest/edit, all.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeASQiYrT695JU02uRpn6QbQZOdjADdfVlJ0WB5wjHw

We now have 21 examples of contributors who seem to live in China, as well as details of their contributions, in the GDoc.

I could keep digging, but I think that's likely enough to show our use of the Submariner trademark in China.

Please let me know if that data works for SUSE/CNCF.

Thanks,

Daniel

 

We've had many contributions from people living in China. We've also given a talk about Submariner in China, but that was in 2019.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Alan Clark]

I added a bit more to the document to simply help readers that aren't familiar with what CNCF is, what git stars are, what a fork is, etc.

You've done a great job with this document.  Thank you so much for that.  I think it looks great.  I think it should be sufficient.

I've sent the document link to the LF legal.   

Let's see if they feel this is sufficient.

AlanClark