Original English text:Google open sources trademarks with the Open Usage Commons

Google announced a new organization calledOpen Usage Commons（OUC）

Although OUC currently covers only three Google projects, it aims to provide a neutral and independent trademark destination for open source projects. The organization will also assist in conformance testing, establishing guidelines for the use of trademarks and dealing with trademark use issues. The organization will not provide services beyond the scope of use, such as technical guidance, community management, project activities or project marketing.

Chris DiBona, Google's director and OUC chairman, said in an interview:

For the Open Source Promotion Association (OSI), which manages the open source definition, this is also news. The OSI Chairman Josh Simmons said:

Many people find Google's new approach odd. Trademarks have long been important to open source companies and organizations. Red Hat, for example, had to make it clear in 2004 that while it allowed anyone to use its source code, it did not allow anyone to use a trademark

Another well-known open source trademark case, Mozilla registered in 2005

Finally, most open source projects have registered their names and logos as trademarks. As with Mozilla and red hat examples, this often means that these brand elements are not included in the program's source code. It is only contained in binary files.

That said, Andrew of open source standards and patent experts, founding partners Gesmer Updegrove top technology law firms

Of course, Google and its projects are hard to say

So why doesn't Google do that? For example, the cloud native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is happy to manage istio.

Updegrove think "there may be more to the story. He noted that there was an important difference between Google's approach and the simple transfer of ownership of trademarks:

CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk have such doubts.

Aniszczyk isn't the only one curious about google's move. The Cloud Foundry Executive Director Chip Childers stated:

So, is Google creating OUC just for its own benefit? Or will the Organization eventually become a useful part of the open source intellectual property community? We can only wait and see how it will end.