There is a discussion going on at SugarCRM's forum page, "Why the Sugar license is mad, bad and may be dangerous" -- part of a much larger discussion that Matt Aslett captures well in this article on the current state of such non-OSI-approved licenses -- that reminded me that I've been meaning to explain something to you about trademarks.

A trademark lawyer writes about the reaction to the recent decision to grant trademark registration to the term "SLART", widely used to refer to art done in the Second Life virtual world. The registrant is reportedly trying to stop others from using the term. The article includes an overview of trademark law and discussion of its application in virtual worlds.

All right. I'm teasing you. I know you don't all hate trademark law, and I think some of you who do just don't understand it yet. So I have quite seriously been trying to figure out a way to explain trademark to you better than I have already.

Rosetta Stone's trademark lawsuit against a competitor brought to mind the simmering issue of trademark violations in open source. One of the opportunities and challenges in open source is that presumably anyone can be an expert in Project X, Y, or Z. Because of this dispersed expertise, the opportunity to run afoul of trademark violations is rife.

While trademarks are often lumped together with copyrights and patents—under the poorly termed "intellectual property" umbrella—trademarks are quite different. One of those differences is that a trademark must be actively enforced, at least under US law, or the mark holder risks losing it.

When the Ubuntu One service launched, some concerns has been raised about the name of the service. Since Ubuntu is mainly a community effort, the use of the “Ubuntu” trademark for a commercial service split the community in two.

There is another bill [PDF] in the SCO bankruptcy for us to go over with a fine-toothed comb, this one from Pachulski Stang, their 20th bill. And we have finished doing the text of the exhibits to SCO's proposed sale, and I noticed some things in the trademark list I thought I might highlight. It always pays to do these text versions. You do notice things that otherwise don't seem to stand out.

Proprietary software, we all know it, almost all of us have once used it. Video games are software, and the majority of all games on the market are still proprietary. When a free game uses a popular GNU/Linux distribution logo, therefore, trademark, to describe something; most GNU/Linux distribution vendors let it slide.

For many years, the term "open source" has been subject to abuse. Despite efforts by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) to trademark the phrase, the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) claimed the phrase was too generic to be trademarked, thereby weakening efforts to guard against its improper usage, according to Danese Cooper, secretary and treasurer of the OSI board.