Trademarks for open-source projects

Posted Jan 28, 2016 2:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: Trademarks for open-source projects

Trademarks can be useful to protect a free software project's reputation, but only as long as the right people control the trademark. Trouble comes about when the trademark owner and the people actually doing the bulk of the work that created a program's reputation are different people, and they disagree. If the project forks, often the "wrong" party winds up owning the trademark, where I mean "wrong" in the sense that the person or group who winds up with the trademark is at war with the people who are doing the real work that gave the project its reputation.

Maybe some European-style "moral right" concept could help to address the situation, I am not sure.

Trademarks for open-source projects

Posted Jan 28, 2016 13:41 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

>Trouble comes about when the trademark owner and the people actually doing the bulk of the work that created a program's reputation are different people, and they disagree. If the project forks, often the "wrong" party winds up owning the trademark, where I mean "wrong" in the sense that the person or group who winds up with the trademark is at war with the people who are doing the real work that gave the project its reputation.

The lines about 'having a conversation' about it will force a project to put appropriate governance in place.

There is an avenue where clear trademark licensing is needed. In terms of the Four Freedoms, it may serve the FSF well to add language which explicitly states that: you get a licence to use the project's marks and reputation when running, studying and redistributing unmodified copies. You get a licence to use the project's marks and reputation when you modify the works but not when you redistribute modified versions of the works without also contributing back to the community which has established the marks and reputation you rely on. Finally, it's not an infringement of the marks and reputation to mark your modified versions of the works with a similar name, provided that the similarity is proportional to the extent of your modifications (e.g. "ProjectName GIT_HEAD+my_extension_branch" explicitly states your extensions, while an organisation creating a fork of the Linux kernel project for their hypervisor and using a mark such as 'LinESXi' without contributing back upstream might cause some confusion and be outside the realms of the trademark licence).

K3n.