Marks for Angular and Gerrit also handled by org designed to provide ‚guidance‘ to industry
Google says it has set up an organisation to provide guidance and advice on handling and protecting trademarks belonging to open-source projects.
The ads’n’search giant said today: „[O]ne of the places we’ve historically seen projects stumble is in managing their trademarks – their project’s name and logo… today we are announcing the Open Usage Commons (OUC), an organization focused on extending the philosophy and definition of open source to project trademarks.”
The new org has had some initial funding from Google, and has three sets of trademarks to manage for starters: those of Angular (Typescript web framework), Gerrit (code collaboration tool) and Istio (a service mesh for Kubernetes). All three of these projects are closely associated with Google.
Chris DiBona, director of Open Source at Google and Alphabet, said the project arose from the internet goliath’s own experience: „Currently we have more than 3,000 active open source projects. Google ends up hitting all the intellectual property edge cases before anybody else … one of the places that open source hasn’t been great is around trademarks.“
He continued: „If you look at open source licenses they either don’t mention trademarks at all, or they disclaim them. What that meant was people just read the Apache license and figure it applies to everything. We decided we need to fix this for open source software. Open source makes it clear for any piece of software what you can do and what you can’t do.“
„We wanted to bring that kind of comfort and clarity to trademarks and establish guidelines in accordance with the open source definition for trademark usage,“ the Googler added to The Register.
The OUC is an organization with six directors, DiBona being one of them.
