This afternoon on Twitter, I saw an interesting interchange between @mchmarny and @samj

from @mchmarny:

VMware’s Cloud Foundry is to PaaS what OpenStack is to IaaS

and in reply from @samj:

@scottsanchez @mchmarny: a nit — you don’t see “rackspace @openstack“, nor should you see “vmware @cloudfoundry“.

But that got me thinking along the lines of my earlier post about cloudfoundry.com compared to cloudfoundry.org.

The trademark for “Cloud Foundry” belongs to VMware, and their legal page states:

Cloud Foundry, VMware, the VMware “boxes” logo and design are registered trademarks or trademarks (the “Marks”) of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.  You are not permitted to use the Marks without the prior written consent of VMware.

I’m not a lawyer, but to me that pretty clearly states that you couldn’t fire up a competitive service to cloudfoundry.com using the cloudfoundry.org software, and mention “Cloud Foundry” on your service. This compares to comprehensive OpenStack’s trademark policy, which has a significant section on “Permitted uses”, including one part:

If you may use the OpenStack Word Mark to describe that your solution is built on or with the OpenStack technology formally released on the www.openstack.org website (using genuine OpenStack code base), you must state that your product is “Built With the OpenStack™ technology.”

While there’s plenty of time for VMware to make cloudfoundry.org the PaaS layer to OpenStack’s IaaS layer, there’s also plenty of work for VMware to do before that initial statement is true.