Free and Fair to Use.

The Open Usage Commons gives open source project users peace of mind that projects are free and fair to use.

About the Open Usage Commons

The Open Usage Commons helps projects protect their project identity through programs such as trademark management and usage guidelines. We are guided by a dedication to open source, a passion for open use, and a commitment to being an organization created in service to open source projects.

Open Usage Commons FAQ

Trademark Guidelines

Projects

  • Istio

    An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices

  • Angular

    A web application framework for mobile, desktop, and web

  • Gerrit Code Review

    A free, web-based team code collaboration tool.

The Open Usage Commons currently uses the existing trademark policies for the Open Usage Commons project trademarks. Existing permitted uses under the existing project trademark policies will continue to be permitted by the Open Usage Commons. The trademark policies for the project marks may evolve under the stewardship of the Open Usage Commons, but always with a focus on maximally supporting open source development and aligning tightly with the open source definition.

News

Releasing the OUC General Trademark Usage Guidelines

September 22, 2021

Open Usage Commons (OUC) is releasing version 0.1.0 of its trademark usage guidelines for open source projects. The resulting template guidelines honor the spirit of the OSD and strive to support developers through clarity around trademark usage permission – balancing the tension between permissiveness and necessary trademark protection.

Introducing the Open Usage Commons

July 8, 2020

Open source maintainers don’t often spend time thinking about their project’s trademarks. But trademarks – whether a name, logo, or badge – are an extension of a project’s decision to be open source. The Open Usage Commons is dedicated to creating a model where everyone in the open source chain – from project maintainers to downstream users to ecosystem companies – has peace of mind around trademark usage and management.

Board

The Open Usage Commons is overseen by a Board of Directors. The Board will publish criteria for projects to join the Open Usage Commons shortly, but you can contact us to express your interest. Read the Open Usage Commons establishment announcement.

  • Allison Randal

    Allison is an open source software developer and strategist, board member at the Software Freedom Conservancy, board member at the OpenStack Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders. At various points in the past she has served as president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, and technical architect of Ubuntu. She collaborates in the Debian project, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.

  • Anne Bertucio

    Anne Bertucio is a senior program manager at Google where she works on strengthening the security practices of Google’s open source projects, helps Googlers work in open source, and brings these security practices to the wider open source ecosystem. Prior to Google, Anne was a staff member of the OpenStack Foundation (now known as the Open Infrastructure Foundation). Anne has degrees in policy and ethics.

  • Charles L. Isbell, Jr.

    Dr. Charles Isbell is a researcher and an educator. As the former, he pursues research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and as the latter he pursues structural educational reform in computing. In both cases, he emphasizes accessibility and equity as a way of bringing as many folks as possible into the ongoing conversation around technology.

  • Cliff Lampe

    Cliff Lampe is a Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. His work looks at the intersection of social systems and technology. In particular, he has studied how the design of online communities and social media interact with social processes. He has worked closely with Wikipedia, Slashdot, Facebook, Reddit and other sites in the pursuit of these questions. Dr. Lampe is a Distinguished Member of the Association of Computing Machinery, and has won multiple awards for research, teaching, and service.

  • Chris DiBona

    Chris DiBona oversees a variety of Open Source programs across Google, helping release thousands of projects since his start in 2004, including Tensorflow, Chromium, Kubernetes, Android and Go. Chris has his masters from Carnegie Mellon University, is an advisor to the Royal United Services Institute and served on the US Commerce Department’s Data Advisory Council. He is a published author, editor and podcaster. Also, he has advised a number of productions, including HBO’s Silicon Valley and FX’s Devs.

  • Miles Ward

    Miles is the Chief Technology Officer at SADA Systems, arriving at SADA after previously serving as the Director of Solutions at Google Cloud, succeeding leadership positions in solutions architecture at Amazon Web Services and Visible Technologies. Miles’ focus on the customer and their success totals to billions of dollars of infrastructure supporting cloud migrations and scaled implementations of open source software. Outside of the cloud, Miles plays a mean electric sousaphone.

Trademark Committee

The Open Usage Commons Trademark Committee manages transferred trademarks. Trademark management is done on behalf of projects but also with participation from the project’s technical leadership. Each accepted trademark has a project technical representative on the trademark committee to ensure that trademark management is informed by the project itself. All members of the Open Usage Commons Board are also members of the trademark committee.