Open Source Proponents React to Google's 'Open Usage Commons' (diginomica.com) 11
Google's announcement of a new open source initiative called the Open Usage Commons "caused some consternation among other open source proponents," according to Diginomica:
IBM's reaction is typical. In a statement, the company said that "the creation of the Open Usage Commons (OUC) is disappointing because it doesn't live up to the community's expectation for open governance... Without this vendor-neutral approach to project governance, there will be friction within the community of Kubernetes-related projects...."
Google's underlying reason was that the management of trademarks was an area for legal specialists — something beyond the competence of open source project maintainers. According to Google, the new initiative would address this knowledge gap. "The Open Usage Commons is therefore dedicated to creating a model where everyone in the open source chain — from project maintainers to downstream users to ecosystem companies — has peace of mind around trademark usage and management. The projects in the Open Usage Commons will receive support specific to trademark protection and management, usage guidelines, and conformance testing...."
The Linux Foundation's response... "When trademarks of an open source project are owned by a single company within a community, there is an imbalance of control... The reservation of this exclusive right to exercise such control necessarily undermines the level playing field that is the basis for open governance. This is especially the case where the trademark is used in association with commercial products or solutions."
Red Monk analyst James Governor says that while Google's actions can be seen as provocative, it has gone down an interesting route. "The CNCF community is perhaps justifiably upset given expectations about Google's direction of travel for open source projects, but the creation of a trademark commons is an interesting one. We shall have to see how this plays out. There could be a fork ahead, or it all might be a storm in a teacup."
Google's underlying reason was that the management of trademarks was an area for legal specialists — something beyond the competence of open source project maintainers. According to Google, the new initiative would address this knowledge gap. "The Open Usage Commons is therefore dedicated to creating a model where everyone in the open source chain — from project maintainers to downstream users to ecosystem companies — has peace of mind around trademark usage and management. The projects in the Open Usage Commons will receive support specific to trademark protection and management, usage guidelines, and conformance testing...."
The Linux Foundation's response... "When trademarks of an open source project are owned by a single company within a community, there is an imbalance of control... The reservation of this exclusive right to exercise such control necessarily undermines the level playing field that is the basis for open governance. This is especially the case where the trademark is used in association with commercial products or solutions."
Red Monk analyst James Governor says that while Google's actions can be seen as provocative, it has gone down an interesting route. "The CNCF community is perhaps justifiably upset given expectations about Google's direction of travel for open source projects, but the creation of a trademark commons is an interesting one. We shall have to see how this plays out. There could be a fork ahead, or it all might be a storm in a teacup."
Seems a bit of a reach (Score:2)
The code is free. I’m not sure why you need to control a companies trademark. Businesses are certainly free and encouraged to foster monetary pursuits under the open source banner.
You are free at any time to fork the code and brand it under your own name. Miranda comes to mind and I believe they improved upon the original product. Same with X.
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There are only three projects there so far, and the one Google was willing to include is Angular. Not exactly one of their higher-profile properties (and one that isn't exactly thriving).
This Commons seems like one of those initiatives that's pre-destined for the Google Graveyard.
Correction (Score:2)
- All three of the projects are Google started
- Istio, not Angular, is the major concern. Istio is a core project in Kubernetes. Angular is just another UI library.
Re: Seems a bit of a reach (Score:3)
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> too stoopid to understand copyright law
I can't tell if this is intentionally ironic or not
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It was unclear which fork of OO.o would become dominant, until it wasn't, and now we all know it's LibreOffice. It caused some momentary confusion, but then we figured it out, and the only problem was some people had to go without updates for a while.
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A famous example is Iceweasel.
Iceweasel is rebranded Firefox, with very little change besides the name and logos. It is a fork created by Debian because the Mozilla trademarks weren't compatible with the Debian licensing policy. I think they sorted things out because recent Debian distributions come with the "real" Firefox.
Uh, what? (Score:2)
I haven't thought about this too much, but doesn't opening up a trademark defeat the whole purpose of a trademark? It's a brand, not a technology or even a way of thinking.
I assume this is intended to help situations where lots of different trademarked technologies are licensed to be included into a single project. It still sounds like it won't end well or there's an underhanded agenda, here. It's just trading an existing set of established and well-understood rules (trademark law) for another set of pot
An easy solution: (Score:1)