Before crafting a strategy, knowing what constitutes a trademark is important. Trademarks can be any of the following:

In short, a trademark can be anything to distinguish your organization or your project from another. The trademark is how others will recognize you, your community, and your work.

Trademarks carry an added weight in an Open Source context. When you have an Open Source work, you guarantee that anyone can read, run, revise, and redistribute the original work. Someone else (or another organization) may choose to modify your original Open Source work into a similar or different work. Sometimes this is done to submit upstream contributions back to the original work, and there is little to no need for strong trademark policies. Other times, this is done to create a competing solution or product to the original Open Source work.

When an original work is used to create a new work, a clear trademark strategy becomes important. The new work may have a different vision from the original work. It may or may not try to be associated to the original work. If the new work opts to remain closely tied to the original work, a trademark is how the two works will be distinguished from each other. From a business model perspective, a clearly distinguished trademark is what allows your customers (and prospective customers) to recognize your work, your services, and your community from others.

While Open Source works are meant to be shared, built upon, and extended by others, a trademark is something unique to the original creators of a work and is not meant to be widely reused or remixed. If a trademark is unclear or left ambiguous, it leaves room for a competitor or another project to disrupt the original project by using brand recognition and customer familiarity to shift focus to a new work. Even if there is goodwill between an original work and a new work, this can happen unintentionally and create confusion for both works if it is not clarified in advance.

One example of how business models can impact trademarks is by looking at Moodle, an open-source learning management system (L.M.S.). The Moodle L.M.S. is described by the company below:

The Moodle trademark is governed under specific allowed and restricted uses. They offer a partner certification program, where service providers or resellers can obtain certification by Moodle. Certification also grants official permission to use the official Moodle trademark in marketing and outreach by the partner company.

Furthermore, Moodle also leveraged its own competitors to buy into the Moodle business model. In 2012, the e-learning company Blackboard acquired two companies that provided support for using Moodle. Blackboard also launched an Open Source Services Group internally to go along with these acquisitions, a move that surprised many who were familiar with Blackboard’s business strategy pre-2012.

These investments into the Moodle L.M.S. by Blackboard were followed with code contributions and financial support from Blackboard to Moodle Trust, which funds core development on the Moodle platform.

Various resources and information pertaining to trademarks in an open-source context.

Special thanks to Chris Aniszczyk for his contribution in this article.