Google LLC today said it’s establishing an independent industry body called Open Usage Commons to help open-source developers manage their projects’ trademarks.

In the context of open-source software, trademarks are projects’ names and logos. These brand assets have emerged as a source of legal complexity in the world of free software that Google wants to simplify to give users more “peace of mind,” Chris DiBona, the company’s director of open source, wrote in a blog post. 

At the heart of the matter is the way free software is licensed. Open-source projects by definition permit free use of their code, but they often don’t provide clear guidelines on what users can and can’t do with trademarks such as a project’s name. That’s because the majority of open-source projects use the same limited set of popular licenses, and those licenses the most part don’t cover trademarks.

The issue is coming to the fore now that open-source technologies such as Kubernetes are becoming an increasingly important part of the broader technology ecosystem. Because trademark usage policies are often unclear, companies building commercial products based on open-source software and other users can be left in an uncertain position. That’s what Google’s new initiative is aimed at fixing.

The Open Usage Commons organization will offer open-source project maintainers to manage trademarks on their behalf. Google’s goal is to save time for developers while creating a simpler legal structure for users of their software. 

“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,” DiBona wrote. “Trademarks sit at the juncture of the rule of law and the philosophy of open source, a complicated space; for this reason, we consider it to be the next challenge for open source, one we want to help with.”

Trademarks play a particularly important role when it comes to the largest and most popular open-source projects. In cases where multiple distributors create commercial versions of an open-source technology, the original developers can use their trademark to enforce quality standards. A developer could, for instance, make a distributor’s use of the technology’s name and logo conditional on their product meeting certain quality standards.

The Open Usage Commons is launching with three initial projects, all from Google: the Istio service mesh, the Angular web application frame and Gerrit, a developer collaboration tool.

Image: Google