Home: Model Trademark Guidelines
Contents
Welcome!
Welcome to the Model Trademark Guidelines, written for use by free and open source software communities. This site proposes language one might use for trademark guidelines for FLOSS software projects. It describes various provisions that might be included in trademark guidelines and discusses the legal considerations for the provisions. It is not intended to advocate for any particular set of permissions or restrictions, but rather is designed to provide a range of choices that would be found lawful and enforceable under trademark law, that are consistent with FLOSS culture, and that respect the trademark owner's desire to ensure that the software distributed under the trademark delivers a consistent user experience and meets the brand promise of the name.
How the Project Works
The software used for this site is MediaWiki, the same software used for Wikipedia, so the functionality may already be familiar to you. You can find basic help on the "Help" tab on the left column. You can also find more extensive help at the Wikipedia help pages.
Page Organization
The "Discussion" pages (the tab at top left on each page) are for conversations between project participants about proposed edits. The "Commentary" pages (linked through footnotes) are in their own "Commentary" namespace and are explanatory material relevant to one using the model trademark guidelines.
How to Participate
Please keep all discussion here (not in private email strings, IRC chats or Twitter/Identi.ca) so that everyone will have full access to all the thought processes, conversations, and iterations of the guidelines. In order to facilitate this, while you do not need to create a login to use the site, if you do set up a login you can set watches on the pages of interest to you. Under your "Preferences" tab, in the "User Options" section check "'E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed" and you will receive an email alerting you of any changes.
We welcome everyone's views and hope to have some strong debates about what FOSS software communities need and what they can do to protect their legal interests.
The Guidelines
Model Trademark Guidelines (coming soon)
Working draft (add your suggestions here)
Commentary
There are "Commentary" pages associated with the guidelines, designed to provide background information and explanatory material for the specific provisions in the model trademark guidelines. They are linked from the Model Trademark Guidelines and working drafts and designed to be used in conjunction with those pages, but links are also provided below for direct access to the pages.
