Name and badge policy

Everything in this project is open except two things: the name and the conformance badge. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the badge worth wearing. If anyone can claim compatibility, the claim carries no information.

This file is the source. https://cabuya.org/trademark renders it in both languages; if the two ever disagree, this file is right.

The model is Certified Kubernetes — an open specification, an open test suite, and a closed mark that only conformance unlocks — with one deliberate difference: there is no fee, ever, and that is written here rather than merely intended. Adopters here are volunteer teams building aid software at night. A fee of any size would turn the badge from a mark of shared work into a filter on who can afford to be legitimate.

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The marks

Mark	Who may use it	How it is earned	Status
«Compatible con Cabuya 1.0» / «Cabuya 1.0 compatible»	Any application whose live feed passes the public validator	Self-service and automatic. Point the validator at your feed. It passes, the registry records the timestamp and the result, you display the badge. No application, no committee, no fee.	Active
«Cabuya Certificado»	—	—	Reserved and unused.

The second row is a commitment, not an omission. Do not create a certification tier the project cannot staff. An unstaffed certification is worse than none, because it promises a review nobody performs. The word certificado appears nowhere in the badge, the registry, the validator or the documentation, and a test enforces that.

What you may do without asking anyone

• Say true things about your software. Nominative, descriptive use needs no permission from anybody — in English or in Spanish, so «implementa Cabuya» and «compatible con el Protocolo Cabuya» are as free to write as their English equivalents.
• Display the unmodified badge while the registry shows a passing validation for a live feed.
• Fork the specification and say so, in either language — «basado en el Protocolo Cabuya 1.0» is a true statement and a permitted one. It is CC0; forking is a right, not a favour. What a fork may not do is call itself Cabuya.
• Teach, write, present, criticise. Talks, posts, courses, hostile reviews. A trademark policy that could be used to suppress criticism is a trademark policy being misused.

What you may not do

• Display the badge when validation fails, has never run, or names a version you do not implement. Badges are version-scoped: Cabuya 1.0 is a claim about 1.0 and nothing else.
• Use the name as your identity — CabuyaApp, Cabuya Inc, cabuya.com.co. Nominative use is fine; identity appropriation is not.
• Modify the badge. No recolouring, no redrawing, no removing the version, no adding your logo into it.
• Imply endorsement, certification or partnership that does not exist. This is the project’s first rule restated as trademark policy: we do not endorse organisations we have not verified, and nobody may claim we did.

The words that are never used

Not a style preference — each of these makes a claim the project cannot back:

Word	Why not
Certificado / certified	Nobody certifies anything here. A validator measured a document at a moment.
Powered by Cabuya / Impulsado por Cabuya	The protocol does not power anything. The application does the work and speaks the format.
Cabuya compatible, unversioned	An unversioned claim survives the version it was measured against. That is how a badge becomes a lie by sitting still.
Endorsed, partner, official	Inclusion in the registry is not endorsement, and the registry page says so in both languages.

How this is enforced

At this project’s size, enforcement is social and evidentiary, not legal, and saying so plainly is more useful than implying a legal capability that does not exist.

1. The registry is the source of truth. Anyone can check any badge against a public validation result and its timestamp. A false badge is not an accusation to litigate — it is a discrepancy anyone can see.
2. Revalidation runs on a schedule. A feed that breaks moves to failing in the registry with the date. The badge stops being true and the registry says so before anybody has to complain.
3. Escalation is a conversation first. Nearly every misuse will be a stale badge after a refactor. A maintainer opens an issue or writes an email, and almost all of it resolves there.
4. Legal escalation is deferred, because the project has no entity to hold a registered mark. Until then the name is held as an unregistered common-law mark, and this policy is published so the claim is at least on the record and dated.
5. Formal registration follows the move to a fiscal host, not before — see GOVERNANCE.md. Registering in Colombia (SIC) and possibly the United States (USPTO) is a task for whoever can legally own a mark. Costs have not been quoted and are deliberately not estimated here.

Trademark status, stated honestly

No formal clearance search has been performed. A web search in August 2026 found no software company, product or brand using the name, but a web search is not a clearance search, and no register — SIC Colombia, USPTO, EUIPO — has been queried. The name is used as an unregistered common-law mark on that basis.

If you hold a conflicting mark, please open an issue or write to the project alias. Finding out early is better for everyone than finding out in a letter.

If the badge is on your README

You are the person this policy is written for, and there is nothing you need to do. Your badge reads the live measurement; if your feed breaks, the badge changes and the registry explains why. It cannot say something about your software that the validator has not found.