Google Inc. a new non-profit organization "", aimed at protecting the identity of open projects and providing assistance in trademark management (project name and logo), establishing rules for trademark usage, and ensuring compliance. The organization's goal is to expand the philosophy and definition of trademarks.
Ownership of code-related intellectual property lies with developers, but the trademark identifying the project is separate from the code, is not covered by the code license, and is managed independently from property rights to the code. The Open Usage Commons organization focuses on servicing open projects that lack the necessary resources to independently address trademark-related issues. Furthermore, transferring the trademark to an independent and neutral organization will prevent it from being registered to a specific participant, thereby avoiding dependency of the project on that participant.
It is noted that the organization was created because the free, transparent, and fair use of trademarks in open source software is considered an important factor for maintaining the stability of the Open Source movement in the long term. However, working with trademarks requires knowledge of certain legal nuances unknown to most who support open projects. The Open Usage Commons organization implements a model where all community members, from maintainers to end-users and involved companies, can be unconcerned about trademark usage and management.
The names of established projects often serve as a mark of quality. The use of well-known names for exploitation and the promotion of low-quality third-party developments can negatively impact a project's reputation; thus, it is important to establish fair conditions for the use of trademarks. On one hand, such conditions, when met, will allow everyone to freely use the trademark without prior permission, but on the other hand, they will curb selfish attempts to promote third-party products by leveraging the popularity of others and misleading users with false claims of affiliation with the project.
To manage the organization and develop criteria for accepting open projects under its wing, a board of directors has been formed, which includes well-known figures from the community and industry, such as Chris DiBona (managing Open Source projects at Google), Miles Ward (CTO of SADA Systems), Allison Randal (from the Software Freedom Conservancy), and Cliff Lampe (a professor at the University of Michigan). The first projects to join the organization were the microservices platform , the web framework , and the code review system .
Addendum: IBM disagrees with Google's actions regarding the transfer of the Istio project's trademarks to the new organization, as this step violates previously agreed-upon terms. The Istio project is collaborative and was formed by merging Google's Istio project and IBM's Amalgam8 while retaining the common name Istio. When forming the joint project, it was agreed that once maturity was reached, it would be transferred under the auspices of a nonprofit organization independent of specific manufacturers (CNCF), which will also take over the processes of managing licenses and trademarks. According to IBM, the new organization Open Usage Commons (OUC) does not align with the principles of , independent of individual suppliers (3 out of 6 members of the OUC governing board are current or former Google employees).
Source: opennet.ru
