I received an email yesterday from Alexander Muse, the CEO of Spur, concerning a potential problem arising from his open source release of the Big in Japan social media tools. All of the Big in Japan social media tools were released under the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) in November. One of these tools is called SocialMail, which allows email to be sent as RSS.
It seems that a new startup company, SocialMail, is not happy with the naming confusion. Although this type of conflict isn’t specific to open source licensing, it does raise some interesting questions concerning open source project brand protection. In this case, Alex is pursuing trademark protection. If you search the USPTO trademark database for “socialmail” ( …
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