What to Protect in Open Source Software

eldavojohn writes "I found a brief blog by Marc Fleury on something that seems to almost be an oxymoron — what you need to legally protect in Open Source Software. The short of it is that you should trademark your name and brand it. Which might explain Xen's stance on the use of the brand 'Xen'. Another short blog notes that you should also maintain control of your distribution channels. Fleury also states this interesting tidbit on protecting intellectual property in OSS, 'Short of filing patents, there isn't much you can do in OSS. Let's face it the IP is there for everyone to see. If you are in a mode where a lot of the value is the code itself then open sourcing under GPL or equivalent reciprocal license may be a good choice for you. At least you will make sure that ISV's that re-use your license get in contact with you and many of them will pursue dual-licensing, a strategy that is known to work to monetize an OSS user base (mySQL).' Is there anything else you should take measures to protect in open source software? Is it possible to maintain control of a project under the GPL or are you constantly faced with forks?"

Comments

Duh,

[pb]

Didn't Red Hat already demonstrate this principle, years ago? Hopefully for his sake, they didn't trademark it too, pfft...

no protection against forks except excellence

[markhahn]

being GPL means, most of all, that there is no protection against forks. after all, GPL _is_ the ability to fork (ignore RMS's politics and all the other noise.)

how do you avoid forks? by being on the right side - everyone pulls in slightly different directions, and any project would be a mess if it accepted all of them. it's also not just a matter of choosing - ideally, if a fork is threatened, the mainstream would trump the fork. that is, instead of some little feature X, develop a bigger, more general thing that is a superset of X. turn the fork into a trivial an unappealing, limited special case. I'm not advocating hyper-featurism, but to embrace big-picture generalizations.

Re:Fork... the nightmare of the OSS developer..

[mmcuh]

Of course a fork would mean that the oh great lords and owners of the source (Linus, Theo, Miguel, etc...) would be put aside and they could end as simple coders... Linus Torvalds has said many times that he thinks that forks are a good thing, and he don't mind Linux forks at all (although he'd of course want to merge back any good ideas and good code from them). Theo de Raadt started OpenBSD himself as a fork of NetBSD (the entire *BSD family is a tree of forks originating from the original Berkeley software). People in these positions in the free software world have usually thought enough about "free software" to understand that forking is very seldom bad, most of the time harmless, and sometimes very good.

Re:Err, what?

[houghi]

By the by - RedHat has had the same stance: you trademark the name and logos, no problem. That protects your name.

Novell did the same and went one step further. If you want to make a distribution based on openSUSE, all you need to do is remove the trademarks and such. Now how do you do that? Novell has kindly made rembrand which removes the branding.

That way it is fairly easy to make your own distribution. No need to recompile, unless you want to. If you so desire, you CAN recompile everything and then use makeSUSEdvd to make your ISO.

All the rest of the packages has their own licences and regulations.