For many years, the term “open source” has been subject to abuse.
Despite efforts by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) to trademark the phrase, the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) claimed the phrase was too generic to be trademarked, thereby weakening efforts to guard against its improper usage, according to Danese Cooper, secretary and treasurer of the OSI board.
Now, however, after much more frequent assaults on the phrase, Michael Tiemann, president of the OSI and Red Hat’s vice president of open-source affairs, is coming out strongly in its defense.
What happened was that in the past year and a half, there have been numerous new MPL-based (Mozilla Public License) licenses appearing.
Companies like SugarCRM, Socialtext, Scalix and Zimbra have all created their own derivatives of the MPL.
Several of these licenses require developers to use “badgeware,” a prominent display of the licensing company’s chosen logo, if they use the code.
In SugarCRM’s case, that’s a “Powered by SugarCRM” logo that must be at least 106 x 23 pixels in size. This, in turn, must link to the SugarCRM open-source Web site.
Read the full story on Linux-Watch: No More Mr. Open-Source Nice Guy
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