
Open Usage Commons - tosh
https://openusage.org/
======
tosh
[https://openusage.org/news/introducing-the-open-usage-
common...](https://openusage.org/news/introducing-the-open-usage-commons/)

> Open source maintainers don’t often spend time thinking about their
> project’s trademarks, and with good reason: between code contribution,
> documentation, crafting the technical direction, and creating a healthy
> contributor community, there’s plenty to do without spending time
> considering how your project’s name or logo will be used. But trademarks –
> whether a name, logo, or badge – are an extension of a project’s decision to
> be open source. Just as your project’s open source license demonstrates that
> your codebase is for free and fair use, an open source project trademark
> policy in keeping with the Open Source Definition gives everyone – upstream
> contributors and downstream consumers – comfort that they are using your
> project’s marks in a fair and accurate way.

> We created the Open Usage Commons because free and fair open source
> trademark use is critical to the long-term sustainability of open source.
> However, understanding and managing trademarks takes more legal know-how
> than most project maintainers can do themselves.

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daly
The Linux Foundation (with MS on its board) and Google are now suddenly
interested in "helping" with trademark issues.

I smell a rat. This makes no sense.

15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) creates a civil cause of action for claims of false
designation of origin and false advertising. This provides federal protection
for unregistered marks.

Do you expect that MS and Google are going to fight a civil suit to protect
your trademark? Or do you have to sign over the rights to your trademark
first, which means you no longer control the trademark. You no longer control
your project.

Who benefits? Well if MS and Google get people to "sign over" their trademarks
then they can freely define what the trademark means. This would feed into the
MS embrace-extend-extinguish technique. The end result is that they
effectively "own" open source projects. Imagine if MS or Google owned the
Linux trademark and were able to define what was "officially Linux".

This sounds like a "collect the trademarks" competition.

Corporate pokemon.

