Trademarks for Open Source Companies
Matthew Revell makes an interesting point on his blog regarding the use of trademarks and Open Source companies after reading Patrick Finch’s blog. I find this of particular interest since we are currently in the process of filling out the trademark forms for both our company Senokian, and the GPL’d business application EGS which we write, maintain and support and happen to think that it is a good thing.
Our reasons for doing this are to protect the company name and branding by protecting the reputation of the software that we develop. As Senokian we have invested a lot of time and effort into our EGS software and are more than happy to release the code under the GPL but we need to protect our brand for the software incase people start trying to pass off as us and damage our reputation.
Trademarking is part of this process and at the end of the day, we see it as beneficial to us and the community at large. There is no point developing a great piece of software, only to be put out of business and not be able to maintain and support the software we love. As Patrick says:
Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all, and Red Hat surely have a right to their trademark without being labelled “seeking profit at any expense”.
Now we are not Red Hat, but as a company supplying Open Source software we differentiate ourselves from other projects that are not commercially supported by our services and our trademarks are part of this. This brand gives consumers and buyers confidence that the application is professionally developed and supported and that is the value which we sell to our customers.