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Provide documentation on naming packages and skills with the word 'Mycroft' #33

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KathyReid opened this issue Feb 23, 2018 · 1 comment
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@KathyReid
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Provide documentation on naming packages and skills with the word 'Mycroft'

From @zackWelch in Mycroft Chat:

An official prohibition of plug-in or add-on packages from using "mycroft" in their names seems counterproductive when one extends that policy to, e.g., package management or product brand development.
i am curious what the official policy is in these regards... i don't remember seeing a page describing trademark usage and similar issues
if one actually exists, it certainly would be beneficial to have a package naming policy documented as part of the developer tutorial (wherein the user is guided to copy the template to a new project directory)

Breaking this down into specific actions, I think this is what needs to happen:

  • Define a Skill naming standard that reserves the 'Mycroft' keyword for Mycroft-supported Skills
  • Define documentation that explains how the Mycroft trademark is used, and how it can be used by developers. This would need to align with the use of the Apache 2 license on our open source code.
@KathyReid KathyReid self-assigned this Feb 23, 2018
@zachwelch
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I think that reserving the Mycroft word for Mycroft,-supported package names would be a mistake.

The package name is like the title of a book; it is somewhat important to tell people in the title that it relates to a specific universe of related titles. What happens to a package's name when it is officially adopted or deprecated? You would have the package author change the title?

Moreover, each branded skill becomes a miniature advertisement for Mycroft. I think this is an opportunity that should be exploited, not a liability to be avoided.

The use of the brand name should definitely be managed carefully, but the success of open source depends on more liberal use of trademarks than traditional projects (e.g. Linux, Apache, Python, etc.). The policy for the Mycroft trademark should similar: default to permit broad usage but allow for conservative remedial action against bad actors.

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