[Board] so how do osgeo trademarks work?

[Shane Curcuru]

Jody Garnett wrote on 10/11/17 9:30 AM:
> That is great Shane, thanks for reaching out to us.
>
> Your work is on https://choosealicense.com is inspirational ..
> literally. We borrowed your Q&A approach to help members of the
> geospatial field find appropriate open source
> projects: http://osgeo.getinteractive.nl/choose-a-project/

Nice!  Great Q&A as a way to lead new users through a simple set of
questions to lead them in the general direction of the right resources.

FYI, I wasn't involved with ChooseALicense, just ChooseAFoundation.  8-)

>
> I am not quite sure what help we need, for starters I am double
> checking with the board email list (and probably the secretary) what
> trademarks the organization posses.

You can claim any name/logo as your trademark if your organization uses
it consistently (and hopefully with a ™ or ®) to provide a specific and
consistent product or service to the public.  Registration is not
required, but does give you other advantages.

An important question here is: who, specifically, is providing the
various software *products* to the public?  I.e. do your bylaws or other
process documents define that Marble, PostGIS, etc. are projects of
OSGEO the foundation itself?  Or are they run independently, and just
happen to be listed from your website?  Trademarks are about ensuring
that users know *who* they are getting a specific product from.

As a general statement, I'd think you would claim OSGEO as a mark, along
with the names of each specific software product you provide, and
possibly FOSS4G if OSGeo is the producer of those events.

>
> Short term goal is to have a page acknowledging trademarks used while
> writing a new website. When describing our open source projects we
> would like to indicate what proprietary software and file formats can
> be used in a hybrid architecture, or migrated from when adopting open
> source. 
>
> I found the FSF take, of acknowledging trademarks being unnecessary
> <https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html>, but
> that may be too risky for us as an organization.

The question is: what are your organization's goals?  The FSF's views
work fine for them as an advocacy organization, but I would urge you in
the strongest possible terms to *not* follow that, but rather to take
trademarks seriously if you want to attract new projects and
contributors over the long term.

- Shane Curcuru
  http://punderthings.com/

>
> I will pass your http://chooseafoundation.com/ URL onto our marketing
> email list, looks like it will be another great resource.
>
> --
> Jody Garnett
>
> On 11 October 2017 at 05:16, Shane Curcuru <shane at punderthings.com
> <mailto:shane at punderthings.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hello!  Someone mentioned you were talking about trademarks and I was
>     wondering if I can provide any advice (apologies for jumping into your
>     board list if that's inappropriate...)
>
>     I volunteer as VP, Brand Management at the ASF and wrote the trademark
>     policies for Apache projects, so if folks here do have questions, I
>     might be able to help.  For general info about how trademarks work
>     with
>     open source, I've collected some useful links:
>
>       https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources#other
>     <https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources#other>
>
>     Separately, thru my Punderthings consultancy, I'm building up a new
>     website to help open source projects understand what non-profit
>     Foundations are out there to help them with governance:
>
>       http://chooseafoundation.com/
>
>     If OSGeo has a documented process by which new projects can join, I'm
>     happy to take a pull request to add you to the list.
>
>     - Shane Curcuru
>       http://punderthings.com/
>
>
>
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>
>

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