Whether it's a namespace collision or not, it's uncool of them to steal the name of Apache Spark, which was an influential project in machine learning, and must have helped generative AI get to where it is today.
Apache Spark casually gets called Spark, and it especially gets called Spark when referring to subprojects. For instance there's Spark Core, Spark Streaming, and PySpark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Spark
Trademarks are automatic when certain criteria such as usage in commerce are met, at least under the statutory or common law of most/all US states and some other countries with English colonial histories; certain US federal protection under the Lanham Act can also be automatic. You’re probably thinking of registered trademarks which are indeed not automatic. Both kinds are often illegal to infringe, but unregistered trademarks have fewer and weaker remedies in court.
Whenever you see the raised TM symbol, that’s claiming trademark status but not necessarily registered trademark status. The R in a circle is restricted to registered trademarks.
You can see here that Apache’s trademark for Spark is unregistered, but that doesn’t make it invalid (at least in the US and the other countries I alluded to): https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/list/#unreg_s
Fun fact: it’s also possible to register trademarks with US states, but that’s almost always worse than doing so federally with the USPTO, and federal registration is valid nationwide. State-level trademark registration is mainly a historical artifact predating the federal trademark system, but it’s still technically available.
Wouldn't be the first time Microsoft (And other big corporations, anyone remember Apple iOS vs Cisco IOS?) behaves this way [0] . I'm sure there are more examples out there.
We (the GitHub Next team) use and love Apache Spark. So we made sure to connect with ASF before releasing GitHub Spark, and confirm they were comfortable with us using this name.
We felt like there was sufficient difference between the two products, that there wouldn’t be any confusion. Especially with the target audience that GitHub Spark ultimately intends to reach.
That said, we plan to validate this during the Technical Preview phase. Since we absolutely want to be respectful of Apache Spark, and its impact on software.
The GitHub Next team sounds more like a department than a team. It also sounded odd to hear that a group of that size uses and loves something that is unlikely to be used by a large percentage of the team directly. Yay corporate motivational speak! I can use another look at https://despair.com/collections/demotivators after this.
When GitHub Next asked for this, there was already pressure in place for ASF to give that to them, because they're locked into GitHub, so it may not have been given entirely freely. You can say that you're confident it was, but to me it seems impossible to know for sure. I don't know if it was or not. It might be that they would have decided to give it freely but the thought of their relationship with GitHub came to mind while they were considering it. In any case, it's a big ask, because if this takes off, soon the phrase Spark Application that another commenter mentioned will be ambiguous.
With more than 10, I tend to prefer the term department, though the term department could also be used for an organizational division with a smaller number of people.
On the GitHub jobs page, there isn't such a selection, but in autocomplete there are two results for team and none for department or group: https://www.github.careers/careers-home/jobs
They could've called it GitHub Moist, or Github Fungus, or Github Bequeath. They didn't for a very simple reason:
The vocabulary isn't infinite. And within that finite number there's an even smaller set of words you would use for a product. And within that there's an even smaller set of words that are a combination of some of all of pleasant/short/applicable/relevant.
And Spark is a choice because the icon of choice for all things AI-related seems to be the sparkles emoji.
