Passport Without A Visa: Open Source Software Licensing and Trademarks

Tiki Dare, Legal Director, Sun Microsystems, Inc., USA

Open source software has defied its sceptics and become a big business. Governments at the national, state and local level across the globe are requiring open source in their projects. Almost all major commercial software vendors use or distribute code under some open source license. As a user, it’s hard to go a day on the web without interacting with some open source code which has replaced many server side legacy products. Worldwide more than 200 million consumers use open source software products and thousands of enterprises use open source code. The best known open source brand is still probably the Linux operating system, but as open source projects and companies proliferate, the importance of brands to differentiate these offerings is on the rise. Trademarks, the legal rights that form the foundation for brand identity, will necessarily play a larger role in the open source world.

Tiki Dare is the Director of Trademarks & Marketing at Sun Microsystems, Inc. She is responsible for protection of Sun's trademark portfolio worldwide and she supports Sun's corporate and brand marketing. Sun's core brands include the Java technology platform, the Solaris Operating System, the MySQL database management system, Sun StorageTek storage solutions and the UltraSPARC processor. Her expertise includes advertising, intellectual property and competition law. Tiki has been with Sun since September 1997. She holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a J.D. and M.A. in the Humanities from Duke University. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors on the International Trademark Association.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. provides network computing infrastructure solutions that drive global network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Guided by a singular vision, “The Network is the Computer”, Sun provides a diversity of software, systems, storage, services and microelectronics that power everything from consumer electronics, to developer tools and the world’s most powerful data centers. Sun's network computing platforms are used by nearly every sector of society and industry, and provide the infrastructure behind some of the world’s best known search, social networking, entertainment, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, news, energy and engineering companies. By investing in research and development, Sun creates products and services that address the complex information technology issues facing customers today, including increasing demands for network access, bandwidth and storage.