> 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.
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.
> 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.