Provide more help in the Trademarks section of the project proposal form
The language that we use in the Trademarks section isn't correct. It's not a matter of whether or not the team behind a project proposal "would like to" transfer trademarks or domains, trademarks and domains that are directly related to an Eclipse open source project must be transferred to the Eclipse Foundation.
Further, for many in our community -- especially those from the EU -- trademarks are only trademarks when they are registered. Since we're actually a global community, we have to consider the notion of unregistered or "common law trademarks" (as that term is understood in many English-speaking jurisdictions). Basically, if an organisation has used a term publicly before bringing a project named with that term to the EF, that use may be a factor if we ever try to assert our ownership of the term or attempt to register it as our own trademark. It is for this reason that we require a trademark transfer agreement whether the term has been registered as a trademark or not.
We should include a pointer to the trademark transfer agreement along with a brief discussion of why we need it.
Should we include design marks in this?
Similarly, domains that leverage the project name in some way also must be transferred to the care of the EF.
@shmacdonald, let's sort out the right words to use.
We also need to provide better information in the Starting an Open Source Project at the Eclipse Foundation section of the handbook. I'll open a separate issue for that.
/cc @mdelgado624