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July 19, 2020 06:34 pm

Open Source Proponents React to Google's 'Open Usage Commons'

Google's announcement of a new open source initiative called the Open Usage Commons "caused some consternation among other open source proponents," according to Diginomica:IBM's reaction is typical. In a statement, the company said that "the creation of the Open Usage Commons (OUC) is disappointing because it doesn't live up to the community's expectation for open governance... Without this vendor-neutral approach to project governance, there will be friction within the community of Kubernetes-related projects...." Google's underlying reason was that the management of trademarks was an area for legal specialists — something beyond the competence of open source project maintainers. According to Google, the new initiative would address this knowledge gap. "The Open Usage Commons is therefore dedicated to creating a model where everyone in the open source chain — from project maintainers to downstream users to ecosystem companies — has peace of mind around trademark usage and management. The projects in the Open Usage Commons will receive support specific to trademark protection and management, usage guidelines, and conformance testing...." The Linux Foundation's response... "When trademarks of an open source project are owned by a single company within a community, there is an imbalance of control... The reservation of this exclusive right to exercise such control necessarily undermines the level playing field that is the basis for open governance. This is especially the case where the trademark is used in association with commercial products or solutions." Red Monk analyst James Governor says that while Google's actions can be seen as provocative, it has gone down an interesting route. "The CNCF community is perhaps justifiably upset given expectations about Google's direction of travel for open source projects, but the creation of a trademark commons is an interesting one. We shall have to see how this plays out. There could be a fork ahead, or it all might be a storm in a teacup."

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