Trademarks Considered Harmful To Open Source
An anonymous reader touts a blog posting up at PC World titled “Trademarks: The Hidden Menace.” Keir Thomas asks why open source advocates are keen to suggest patent and copyright reform, yet completely ignore the issue of trademarks, which can be just as corrosive to the freedom that open source projects strive to embody. “Even within the Linux community, trademarking can be used as obstructively as copyright and patenting to further business ends. … Is this how open source is supposed to work? Restricted redistribution? Tight control on who can compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name? … Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source. Trademarking is a way of severely limiting all activity on a particular product to that which you approve of. … If an open source company embraces trademarks then it embraces this philosophy. On the one hand it advocates freedom, and [on] the other it takes it away.”
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