The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has allowed its application for a trademark on the term open source to lapse. The mark has been in dispute almost as long as the application has been pending. While still at Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Bruce Perens registered the trademark, paying the fee out of his own pocket. Perens then left SPI and joined the OSI, assuming as he did so that he was entitled to take the trademark with him. Acting on that belief, Perens assigned the trademark to OSI co- founder Eric Raymond. SPI thought otherwise, and has claimed it retains ownership of the mark.
Now Raymond says: We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the US Patent and Trademark Office would register the trademark ‘open source’; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the ‘open source’ concept to the mainstream. As an alternative, Raymond proposes a certification mark: OSI Certified. When the Open Source Initiative has approved the license under which a software product is issued, the software’s provider is permitted by us to use the OSI Certified certification mark for that open source software.
Though some developers are relieved that the trademark dispute between OSI and SPI has been resolved, though not in the best possible circumstances, others are disturbed by Raymond’s proposal. They suggest that centralizing the decision about what is and what is not open source software circumvents the community’s traditional way of making that decision – arguing it out at often tedious length on public mailing lists. As for Perens, he is dismayed at the way things have turned out. I suggested the trademark because of what had happened to the word ‘hacker’, he wrote, referring to the widespread practice of referring to crackers (criminals) as hackers (ordinary programmers). Now watch how Open Source gets abused, Perens wrote, it won’t be pretty.
