Google company new non-profit organization", designed to protect the identity of open projects and to assist in the management of trademarks (project name and logo), the formation of rules for the use of trademarks and verification of their implementation. The purpose of the organization is to expand the philosophy and definitions for trademarks.
The intellectual property associated with the code is owned by the developers, but the trademark that identifies the project is separate from the code, is not covered by the license for the code, and is treated separately from the proprietary rights to the code. The Open Usage Commons organization is focused on serving open source projects that do not have the necessary resources to resolve trademark issues on their own. In addition, the transfer of the trademark to an independent and neutral organization will avoid the registration of the trademark for a particular participant, making the project dependent on this participant.
It is noted that the organization was created because the free, transparent and fair use of trademarks in open source software is seen as an important factor in maintaining the stability of the Open Source movement in the long term. At the same time, working with trademarks requires knowledge of certain legal subtleties that are unknown to most of those who accompany open projects. The Open Usage Commons organization implements a model where all members of the community, from maintainers to end users and companies involved in the ecosystem, can not care about the use and management of trademarks.
The names of proven projects often act as a kind of quality labels. The use of well-known names for abuse and promotion of low-quality third-party developments can negatively affect the reputation of the project, so it is important to develop fair conditions for the use of trademarks. On the one hand, such conditions, if fulfilled, will allow everyone to freely use the trademark without obtaining prior permission, but on the other hand, they will prevent mercenary attempts to promote third-party products due to the popularity of others and misleading users with elements of false belonging to the project.
To manage the organization and develop criteria for accepting open source projects under its wing, a board of directors has been formed, which includes well-known figures in the community and industry, such as Christopher DiBon (Chris DiBona, managing Open Source projects at Google), Miles Ward (Miles Ward, technical director of SADA Systems), Allison Randal (Allison Randal, from the Software Freedom Conservancy) and Cliff Lampe (Cliff Lampe, professor from the University of Michigan). The first projects to join the organization were the microservices platform , web framework and code review system .
Addendum: IBM disagreement with Google's move to transfer the trademarks of the Istio project to the new organization, as this step violates previously agreed agreements. The Istio project is collaborative and formed by merging the Istio project from Google and Amalgam8 from IBM, leaving the Istio common name. When the joint project was formed, it was agreed that after reaching maturity it would be transferred under the auspices of a non-profit organization independent of specific manufacturers. (CNCF), which will take over, among other things, the management of licenses and trademarks. IBM says the new Open Usage Commons (OUC) organization is inconsistent with the principles independent of individual vendors (3 of the 6 members of the OUC governing board are current or former Google employees).
Source: opennet.ru