Simon Willison’s Weblog

I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software’s IP-lawyers is that nobody can use “Varnish Cache” in any context, without their explicit permission. [...]

We have tried to negotiatiate with Varnish Software for many months about this issue, but their IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name, and at most we have being offered a strictly limited, subject to their veto, permission for the FOSS project to use the “Varnish Cache” name.

We cannot live with that: We are independent FOSS project with our own name.

So we will change the name of the project.

The new association and the new project will be named “The Vinyl Cache Project”, and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the “Varnish Cache” name.

— Poul-Henning Kamp, Varnish 8.0.0 release notes