You should follow the trademark rules of Apache Software Foundation

[khmarbaise]

I would suggest to change the name of the plugin to jaxb2-maven-plugin to better follow the naming trademarks.

http://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-development.html

[highsource]

TL;DR: As renaming will damage the community, I will not rename the plugin unless legally or technically forced to.

This issue was discussed before:

• https://java.net/jira/browse/MAVEN_JAXB2_PLUGIN-95
• https://www.mail-archive.com/dev%40mojo.codehaus.org/msg38611.html
• https://java.net/projects/jaxb/lists/users/archive/2014-10/message/10
• http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@maven.apache.org/msg102484.html

My decision is that I won't rename unless I get an official cease-and-desist letter from Apache - or if they'll technically enforce the naming convention.

The main reason is that for a plugin with a such a long history like this one's any renaming is a huge damage to the community. So I need very good reasons for the renaming.

So far Apache and Codehaus did not show much interest in enforcing that naming convention on my plugin, so as long as they don't care, I have no good reason for renaming.

Here's a few more reasons to quote:

• I have never ever even distantly heard of a case where someone would think my plugin is coming from the Apache Maven team.
• The jaxb2-maven-plugin name you're proposing is taken by the Codehaus plugin. Using that name the second time will be very confusing. The names maven-jaxb2-plugin vs. jaxb2-maven-plugin is the primary way people distinguish these plugins.
• Any renaming will disconnect the plugin from the documentation (tutorials, blog entries, discussions, Q&As on Stackoverflow & likes) developed by the community over the years. This would be a direct harm.

To sum up, renaming will damage the community for no good reason.

Now I'd like to address this special sentence from the naming convention you're referencing:

Calling it maven--plugin (note "Maven" is at the beginning of the plugin name) is strongly discouraged since it's a reserved naming pattern for official Apache Maven plugins maintained by the Apache Maven team with groupId org.apache.maven.plugins. Using this naming pattern is an infringement of the Apache Maven Trademark.

Let's look at this the following way. This describes a naming convention for the artifactId a part of a technical name in a third-party software. IANAL but I fail to see how the claim quoted above may be legally valid. Just make one step back and think - if we'd for a moment assume that having a trademark on something will allow the trademark holder to regulate the technical names in third party software, we'll have a bunch of corps telling us how to call our JAR, EXE, ZIP files, classes, methods, variables, scripts etc. This is nonsense, but this is what the quoted statement above assumes to be valid.

Apache holds the trademark on Apache Maven. I am not calling anything Apache Maven (or even Maven). I've called a Maven Plugin something which is a Maven Plugin. Just had not the best luck to use the sequence of words in the artifactId which few years later came out not to follow some naming conventions. Which I'm not even sure existed at the instant of naming six or seven years ago.

I wouldn't actually mind to comply and to rename, not at all. But as I have pointed out above, this will be a great damage to the community. I have to make a decision in the best interest of the community.

And by true Vulcan logic at the moment that is not renaming.

By the same logic the decision to rename will be the right one if and only if the damage of not renaming will be greater that the damage of renaming. This will be in the case if Apache will threaten to shut down my plugin by legal (ex. cease-and-desist letter) or technical means.

Which would be extremely cool. I mean, just imagine - a open-source software foundation threatens an indie open-source developer because of the naming convention. The public will love it.

So I hope you can follow my lines and see that this is a well-considered decision.

I am closing this issue as "won't fix" at the moment.

[michael-o]

Karl Heinz, we should start cleaning out misuse at the ASF first: http://search.maven.org/#search|ga|1|a%3Amaven-*-plugin%20AND%20%20g%3Aorg.apache.*%20AND%20NOT%20g%3Aorg.apache.maven.plugins

[LIttleAncientForestKami]

@highsource nice and extensive write-up. Thank you for the plugin BTW.