Since Sustain OSS 18, we have been working with our non-prodit TheMaintainers/Les Mainteneurs on a new trademark contract enabling maintainers to collect fees based on the commercial usage of their OSS trademark assets. It has the advantage to keep the code open-source as OSI and FSF definition and generate revenue based on commercial usage, where merchant value is created.
In a nutshell, the principle is that " the software of the project is free/libre, the commercial swag of the project is not"
If we consider that the velocity of the project, the contributions quality, the fair governance and the trust in the future is represented by the brand of the project, we have considered that companies like IT consulting and vendors who directly use the trademark assets of the projects should give back a sustainer fee to the project.
But the software stays free to use, modify and redistribute and sell. It is only if you base your commercial promotion on the trademark of the project than you pay a fee back.
In counterpart, you would become an official “Sustainer” with the right to apply for bigger contracts mentioning that you are an official sustainer of OSS project you use.
Trademak based OSS business is a proven model as it is mainly the Redhat business model with RHEL and CentOS. RHEL is the trademark enforced version of the OSS where CentOS is the trademark free version. And it works pretty well commercially. the Maintainers contract just aimes to democratize the model.
And if people want to fork the project!? they can! they just need to give it a new name and new logos.
I just wana stop by and say thanks @medjawii for continuing this work, it’s additive and potentially a great response to a problem that we’ve all seen in ‘ethical’ licensing. I wonder what the response has been so far and what’s next?
I also wonder what you think about Adam Jacob’s SFOSC’s proposal:
Any commercial activity around the software must further the sustainability of the community, and the potential for commercial benefit must be available to all.
In return, they get to use the trademark that gets to be promoted around the community, they get to use the trademarks that we have all over the world, so that was such a real win-win situation, and that’s been the primary business model from, let’s say, 2004 until today.
The Trademark Maintainers contract is agnostic about ethical licensing, because it actually licensing agnostic. It just uses the trademark as the asset to collect maintenance fees for commercial use of the trademark of the project. But the copyright is not engaged in the discussion.
It can be applied on top of any licence (open source or commercial) if you want, but it has been made especially for Open source/free software licence to find a new revenue model based on value captation on top of commercial use of the “brand” and the “swag” of the community. Exactly like described in an other comment about the Moodle business model.
Also, I agree with Adam Jacobs, but there is not yet (at my knowledge) an official legal and business model framework that makes his statement real. The Trademark Maintainer contract makes it live, aligning commercial interests, community valuation by the trademark assets value and maintenance fees collection sustainable and aligned with business interests. I should reach him.
Can someone here make me an intro to him?
Yes, that is exactly the model of Moodle, we just want to democratize it. (OSS developers don’t know well Trademark rules and opportunities)
The Trademark Maintainer contract just makes the legal framework of Moodle “standardized” and and easily “replicable” and “consumable” by other open source projects that can value their trademarks in a commercial use.
