The "Open Usage Commons" launches
Google has announced
the creation of the Open Usage
Commons, which is intended to help open-source projects manage their
trademarks. From the
organization's own announcement: "We created the Open Usage
Commons because free and fair open source trademark use is critical to the
long-term sustainability of open source. However, understanding and
managing trademarks takes more legal know-how than most project maintainers
can do themselves. 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." Initial
members include the Angular, Gerrit, and Istio projects.