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posted by martyb on Friday July 10 2020, @04:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the EMBRACE-EXTEND-EXTINGUISH dept.

Announcing a new kind of open source organization

Google has deep roots in open source. We're proud of our 20 years of contributions and community collaboration. The scale and tenure of Google's open source participation has taught us what works well, what doesn't, and where the corner cases are that challenge projects.

One of the places we've historically seen projects stumble is in managing their trademarks—their project's name and logo. How project trademarks are used is different from how their code is used, as trademarks are a method of quality assurance. This includes the assurance that the code in question has an open source license. When trademarks are properly managed, project maintainers can define their identity, provide assurances to downstream users of the quality of their offering, and give others in the community certainty about the free and fair use of the brand.

In collaboration with academic leaders, independent contributors, and SADA Systems, today we are announcing the Open Usage Commons, an organization focused on extending the philosophy and definition of open source to project trademarks. The mission of the Open Usage Commons is to help open source projects assert and manage their project identity through programs specific to trademark management and conformance testing. Creating a neutral, independent ownership for these trademarks gives contributors and consumers peace of mind regarding their use of project names in a fair and transparent way.

Is it good or a new kind of evil?

Also at Phoronix.


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  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by darkfeline on Saturday July 11 2020, @08:11AM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday July 11 2020, @08:11AM (#1019424) Homepage

    It's heartening to see dozens of Soylentil comments about Google's evility with nary a useful observation in sight. Given all the complexities of society at large, having a safe bubble to retreat to is comforting.

    The problem that Google is trying to solve here quite obvious to me. Trademark ownership and freely licensed code are two separately things. While the source code for, say, FreeBSD, may be freely licensed, I cannot take the source code, with modification or not, set up a website using the FreeBSD name and logo, and distribute my software, for payment or not. I can make my own name and logo, say, BobBSD, but not use FreeBSD's.

    Managing FOSS source code is actually quite simple once you have a suitable license and possibly a copyright assignment process set up, because the ownership of the code is clear: the author of the particular bit of code owns it unless they have assigned that copyright, but anyone can use the code due to the FOSS license.

    However, trademarks are much harder to manage. Who owns the logo and name for some small FOSS project with a dozen contributors? If there's discord and the project splits, which half gets to keep the logo?

    There's also the issue of aftermarket service providers. If I start a VPS service that provides virtual FreeBSD boxes, I can certainly advertise that by using the FreeBSD logo on my website, as that is fair use. Or can I? Each project may have its own opinions on what counts as fair use. Maybe I can use FreeBSD's logo but not OpenBSD's, but I'd have to consult a lawyer. Certainly, managing trademarks is beyond the ability of a developer working on a FOSS side project, just as writing a FOSS license is beyond their abilities. Thankfully, they can use one of the already available, high quality FOSS licenses.

    But no such high quality standards or recommendations exist for trademark management. Hence the current project.

    It sounds like what Google is doing here is what the FSF did for FOSS licenses. As an independent developer, I can go to the FSF website and follow some straightforward guides to set up my project with the right FOSS license and have confidence that my code will be licensed properly. In the future, I may be able to go to the Open Usage Commons website and similarly follow their guides to ensure my project has clear and healthy processes around trademarks, so there's no confusion about what is and isn't fair use of the trademark, and how it is owned in case a rowdy contributor wants to take it and do their own thing.

    Unfortunately from what I could see, the website doesn't include any details so it's hard to say whether this ends up good or bad. But I think it's ultimately good because even if this particular implementation fails, the fact that there's a clear problem and someone is trying to solve it, means that other people are going to be trying too. Someone is bound to get it right, if not Google.

    Trying to provide an informed and objective analysis is hard, but I've found that LWN does a really good job at it. It probably helps that a lot of the articles are behind a subscription paywall. Thankfully, many Soylentils would not be at all interested in unbiased reporting, so they can save their hard earned cash to donate to SN instead.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:32AM (#1019752)

    Fuck off, corporate shill, and pass me a kleenex, something nasty spilled over here.