Tarus Balog over at OpenNMS makes some very good points about trademarks and open source software. Whilst I do completely agree with him over trademark use in open source, having a trademark does introduce a legal duty to defend the mark which may not sit too well with the community.
Keir Thomas wrote a Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference book. Canonical, the people who created the Ubuntu Linux distribution, had a few issues with Keir’s use of the Ubuntu trademark on the site where he is marketing his book. That does sound a bit heavy handed on Canonical’s side. But, just because one party has been heavy handed doesn’t automatically mean that trademarks are all incompatible with open source.
The driving force behind open source is to ensure that users can customise their software and distribute their changes to whomever they like. It does not say that they should be able to distribute their changes under the umbrella of the original project name. A free for all where anybody could distribute any project using whatever name they liked would seriously compromise open source quality and would make open source acceptance in busines much harder.
Update: Ethan Galstad on why Nagios requres a trademark.
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