Groklaw is 10 years old as of today. Over the years its community has worked as a group to explain technology to the legal world and explain the legal process to techies. The combined result has helped defend Free and Open Source Software from cynical copyright/patent/trademark attacks from the proprietary world.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds and is administered by the Linux Mark Institute (www.linuxmark.org). The LMI will grant sub-licenses of the Linux trademark to businesses and groups that want to use the word Linux in their product.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I read this poor review of Mandriva Linux 2010 (the only poor review I’ve seen so far actually), which I got a bit provoked about, not that much because I’m taking things personal, but it’s rather more about stupid people pisses me off!

We are pleased to announce that Automattic has made a remarkable and generous donation by transferring ownership of the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation. We're honored to accept this donation, and to preserve and protect the trademark in the years ahead as a keystone part of the Foundation's mission to ensure that WordPress is around and thrives for generations to come.

It's unfortunate, but an operating system's reputation can, and usually does, have as much effect on its success as its technical merits. For example, this video shows a number of people praising KDE 4, because they think that it is the next version of Windows. Or think about the difference in perception between Windows Vista and Windows 7 versus the real differences.