Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source. Trademarking is a way of severely limiting all activity on a particular product to that which you approve of. That's what it was created to do, and that's what it unapologetically does on a daily basis around the world. If an open source company embraces trademarks then it embraces this philosophy. On the one hand it advocates freedom, and the other it takes it away.

Trademarking encourages organizations to foster back-room deals, and negotiations to get permissions. It's almost exclusively a domain for lawyers. Does this sound familiar? That's right -- it's just like the kind of deals that go on over copyright and patents in the boardrooms of big corporations. And just like patents and traditional copyright, it's totally incompatible with the spirit and ethos of open source software.

Note: Mozilla has asked me to point out that compiled binaries based on source code that hasn't been altered are permitted to use the Firefox trademark.

Keir Thomas is the author of several books on Ubuntu, including the free-of-charge .