Open Source Project Trademarks

Speaker: Anne Bertucio

Track: Other

Type: BoF (45 minutes)

Room: Talks

Time: Aug 28 (Fri): 23:00

Duration: 0:45

Open source licenses do a fantastic job of giving users guidance for how to use and distribute their project. Where open source and FOSS licenses are less clear, or explicitly say they do not cover, are the project’s trademarks.

A group of open source contributors and computer science academics have started having a discussion about how we can apply the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition to project trademarks. As the Debian community is no stranger to the complexities and consequences of project trademarks (looking at a particularly frozen mammal in the family Mustelidae), we want to use this BoF to hear about trademark corner cases end users and maintainers have encountered, trademark management successes and failures, and how applying the DFSG to project trademarks should look.