3 years ago

Things boiled over a bit last week with the announcement that Google launched the Open Usage Commons (OUC) consortium (see Mike Vizard’s article here). The announcement and subsequent angst it has caused has upset what had been a pretty stable environment that helped open source software become the dominant force in development and IT.

Together, this represents a clear bifurcation of managing the code of a project and the trademarks/IP of the project. This is not a new concept in open source, but in recent years has been seldom used.

The concept of the code being open and free while the project owners retaining the IP and trademarks was very much the norm in open source years ago.