Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Uversa's ClearHealth Trademark - Part Two

I'm not sure of the "right" way to handle trademark issues surrounding an Open Source project. Obviously, twenty companies should not offer different products under the same name. This would cause confusion among users of the project. However, the trademark concerns seem contradictory to the spirit of the GPL. Basically, for other commercial entities to benefit from the community, the trademark owner has to get paid. This certainly would reduce the likelihood of code contributions from the "other" commercial entities.

We have contributed code and man hours to Sequoia, a project from Continuent, and to OSWorkflow, a project from OpenSymphony. Both companies are similar to Uversa, in that they offer consulting and development services in addition to the Open Source products. Interestingly enough, both groups / companies have significant Open Source and Internet presence, but OpenSymphony and Continuent don't really have any trademark issues. In fact, I would hazard to say that both of those projects are more popular than ClearHealth.

Searching for ClearHealth on Google: 44,500 results.
Searching for Uversa ClearHealth on Google: 590 results.

Searching for Sequoia on Google: 8,550,000 results.
Searching for Continuent Sequoia on Google: 114,000 results.

Searching for OSWorkflow on Google: 179,000 results.
Searching for OpenSymphony OSWorkflow on Google: 112,000 results.

We have not made a decision as to which route we are going to take. We can fork or rename the project, or we can become a Uversa reseller.

I can certainly appreciate their desire to protect their trademark. Of course, as we continue to modify the codebase, and move further away from the code that they wrote, we will want to use an identifiable name and do not want to be forced to pay someone to use our own code.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 8:48 AM