August 13, 2017 Updated: March 10, 2021
CNCF encourages each project to manage its own website, but after consulting with the projects, we are publishing a set of guidelines around dealing with potential commercial conflicts.
Many CNCF projects began life within a single company (called the “origin company” below) and then transitioned to be community-managed before or after being accepted into the CNCF. This document provides some guidelines on how the project’s website should evolve.
Note that many end users are interested in commercial support for CNCF projects, and project websites are welcome to list and link to companies providing support. However, the key principle is that the origin company should not be favored over any other companies offering the same services.
The guidelines:
- CNCF projects are strongly encouraged to host the source of their websites in an open source repository (and under the same organization) so that requests to change can be done via pull requests and the discussions are archived in a transparent manner.
- It is OK to say that, e.g., “Prometheus was originally created by Soundcloud” or “Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google,” but the origin company should not otherwise be referred to on the project homepage.
- There should be no links or forms for capturing enterprise support leads. Instead, it is fine to have an enterprise support, commercial partners or similar page. Companies must be listed on that page in alphabetical order, or the order can be changed randomly on each page load. It’s OK to have different categories of support offered. Simple vetting by the project is needed to ensure that all companies listed really can provide the support promised. Projects are welcome to outsource this vetting to CNCF staff if it becomes a burden.
- Links to companies offering support are expected to go a page that at least mentions support of the project. This can either be the company homepage or a project-specific landing page.
- If there is a copyright notice at the bottom of the page, copyright should be to the project authors or to CNCF, not the origin company. For details, see Copyright notices.
- CNCF requests that graduated and incubating projects include the sentence “We are a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.” and the CNCF logo near the bottom of their project homepage. Sandbox-level projects should include the sentence “We are a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project.” and the CNCF logo. We also appreciate a link to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as the events approach.
- Website footers must include trademark guidelines by either linking to Trademark Usage (directly or via a "Terms of service" page), or by including the following text: "The Linux Foundation® (TLF) has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of TLF trademarks, see Trademark Usage".
Questions? Email us at info@cncf.io.