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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

> Open source-licensed projects with a non-profit home, *neutral trademark ownership*, and multiple significant contributors are less likely to face pressures to relicense.

What does "neutral trademark ownership" mean?

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Presumably something like "Linux", where although it's owned by Linus Torvalds, there is no single bully organization that gets to use it to the exclusion of others. So, the opposite of something like Mozilla, where Mozilla Foundation owns the trademark, but there's a for-profit vendor that also gets to use it in exchange for kickbacks to the Mozilla Foundation, no one else in the community can operate under that banner, and they have to make it abundantly clear that their work is not endorsed by Mozilla.

Maybe "ownership by a foundation" like Apache or Linux Foundation? Projects I've worked on for corporations have sometimes been donated to foundations for neutral ownership.

That's certainly how I would read it. Although it's not just about the trademark but governance more broadly.

That is almost certainly reference to several open source projects where building the thing from source and distributing the resulting build artifacts is "legally problematic" because of trademarks. In the 00's this was giant issue for Mozilla(TM) anything. If I understand it correctly there is some kind of related issue with for example "OpenShift(TM)".

On the other hand it somewhat seems that most projects learned from the mozilla shitstorm, at least looking at the amount of "foo"s with open core "foo-ium"s. The point there is that whatever sourcetree that the version with trademarked branding gets built from should be fork of the branding-free opensource project, not the other way around.

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