Ms. Meeker,

I appreciate your response to my comment.

I'm actually working on the "you need a lawyer to do it" part as I'm in my second year of law school.

As to brand "dilution." In your opinion does that concept apply equally to brands whose value arguably derives from trusted functionality and/or reliability (the code in this case) as it does to commercial consumer brands such as say Coke whose value dervies from consumer associations to more abstract lifestyle values which given their more subjective qualities are perhaps substantially more prone to dilution?

One more question if you'll indulge me (That makes two questions I suppose)?

Do you think the nexus of Open Source/Trademark/Financing is fertile ground for a law school thesis? If so is there a particular topic that you view as particularly timely?

Thank you.

Thank you.

-Aldo Castaneda

Mr. Castaneda, thanks for your comment. It seems to me that the open source community has been, in general, quite tolerant of the development of brand value on open source projects. Most people who view open source as a viable business model would stress that branding is very important, and the way to develop a valuable business is by developing a valuable brand. If you are one of a "loosely assembled team of developers" working on an open source project, and you hope to create commercial value in the project, it's very worthwhile to put some time into mapping out a branding strategy -- whatever it may be. Licensing trademarks for profit is tricky, though. (It is one of those "don't do this at home" things -- you need lawyer help to do it.) You can leverage a brand, but only so much -- before it becomes diluted and loses its value.

I hope that helps, and thanks for reading the article.

So given your conclusion with regard to the importance of trademark rights as to Open Source projects - Do you think that the early co-development of code along with trademarks is the key to unlocking the distributed economic potential in open source development?

In other words, can a loosely assembled team of developers open code gain financial leverage by selling rights to trademark usage and at the same time let the code be "free"?

Is trademark the goose that laid the Open Source Golden egg?

Seems it would not be too hard, assuming the release of an official version of code to figure out share ownership as a function of code developed. So that when trademark rights are licensed financial returns (this could be from speculative financing as well) could be distributed accordingly.

Is this already being done? Assuming this might work are problems around defining "share ownership" as a function of code contributed too subjective? Is valuation of the trademarket too nebulous? Would the "community" be adverse to this notion, as it is a for profit concept, albeit one that does't impede the end-user access to functionality?

Nice article. Hopefully the Groklaw community will enjoy this one too. Thank you Heaather!

Great article to wake up to on a Saturday morning, thanks!

Great article to wake up to on a Saturday morning, thanks!