OASIS Charter Submission Discuss

Thank you for a very exciting project proposal.  

This comment is about the TC's name.  Using the name and trademark of another OASIS TC requires specific permission grounded in a formal vote of that other TC.  Our CTI TC holds that control over their name "STIX".

The relevant rule is cited below. [fn1]  Each OASIS TC and OP understandably is entitled to guard invocation of its trademarked name so as to not dilute conformity to its own work.  Some of our projects have agreed to similar arrangements before.  E.g., BPEL for People (BPEL4P) TC, a BPEL extension project, and the various OSLC-* parallel projects.

Staff will be happy to help with the process, and how to present your intended name as tentative pending approval.  However, unfortunately, we cannot assume that the CTI TC's approval is a certainty.  In our experience, its decision is not strongly likely to be completed between now and your proposed launch date.  I suggest the following approach.

• Staff will be happy to promptly help initiate the third party permission with the CTI TC.  It might be conditioned: please see "Interop Considerations" below. 
  
• I will assume here that you do not wish to postpone the TC Call for Participation (and thus the launch date of the first permitted meeting) until that approval is completed. 
• Assuming a first meeting of this TC that is announced in the CfP and launched, before that permission is completed, you will need another temporary working name. 
• This will also affect the short metadata token that is used to identify many TC work products (e.g., "cti-" for the CTI TC), which will be irrevocably set for archival and IPR tracking reasons before your launch date.  For that reason we recommend you consider picking an interim name if possible that will support the same short tag.  Let me give you an example:
• If the tentative name, pending approval, is to be STIX4SPACE, consider a cognate pre-launch name like "S4SPACE".  
• I have inserted into the Google Docs charter draft a suggested way to present this approach.  Our tentative view, subject to comments, is that there's nothing wrong or infringing about saying during the negotiation period that the "intended name pending approval" is STIX4SPACE.
  

Each TC (and OASIS) have the clear goals of protecting the conformity and trade names of our specs.  Based on past practice, the CTI TC might ask for -- and our staff might recommend -- conditions to its approval to this name use and implicit endorsement.  These would evolve from discussion, and staff is happy to help kick that off, but as a hypothetical case based on prior instances, you might expect a condition that your charter be edited, before or after launch, to add some constraints like one or more of these:

I might add that some other OASIS projects create extensions of other specs from OASIS (and elsewhere) without infringement and without this naming permission, simply by staying within conformance clauses and not re-using the name of the extended spec (like STIX).  One example is the OASIS DAD-CDM project, applying extended STIX objects and STIX-like models to misinformation risks rather than cyber threats.

Other staff comments in the charter may follow, and will be posted separately during this current review period.  As a reminder, Kelly Cullinane, our director of standards development, administers these matters and is our final authority on what is acceptable, subject only to appeal to our Board of Directors.  So, feel free to contact me with questions if you like, but Kelly's in charge and is your touchstone.

We're delighted that you brought this proposal to us, and excited about the project.  We look forward to working with you. 

Respectfully submitted,  JBC

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Footnotes

[fn1]   We apply this rule in TC Process Sec.1.2: "... The name proposed for the TC shall be subject to approval by the TC Administrator..." to prevent infringements, including by applying this rule from our Open Project Rules:  "Sec 2.1 ... The name proposed for the Project shall be subject to approval by ... Administrator for purposes of confirming infringement and appropriate use issues. If the proposed name includes a reference to an OASIS Technical Committee (TC) or specification title, or the name of another Open Project, then the approval of any open OASIS TC or Open Project who uses that name or has authored that specification is required in advance."

[fn2]   On this first issue, conformity, staff also may ask for this change or a similar one, because it affects licensing, not just trademark or technical interoperability.  OASIS specifications are fully licensed for public use only when a final version is approved and the implementation is conformant to all mandatory portions of the spec.  So any "piecemeal" or forked version does not have the benefit of OASIS license protection, and can't be safely reused or inserted into someone else's specification.