Consider trademarking SCI(tm)

[jawache]

The GSF has mechanisms to trademark projects.

One challenge with terms like carbon neutral or netzero is that they are not trademarked terms and therefore, anyone can really say anything about being carbon neutral or netzero.

Even if there is a "standard" for what those terms mean, without a trademark there is no legal requirement to actually adhere to those standards when you make those claims (other than I suppose being sued for making misleading claims which is hard to prove)

It's a common approach in the open source ecosystem to trademark the names of open source projects, one example is Kubernetes. It's an open source project, you can clone the open source project and do whatever you want with it, apart from call it Kubernetes since that's a registered trademark of the Linux Foundation.

The "Green Software Foundation" is a registered trademark and that means we have legal recourse if someone uses our trademark in a way that's against our trademark policy https://greensoftware.foundation/policy/trademark

If NetZero was a registered trademark then if someone used the term and didn't align to the NetZero Trademark Policy, there is something that can be said and done about that.

What if SCI was a registered trademark? Then if anyone used the SCI in a way that doesn't align to the standard there would be something we could do about it or at least some protection.

Trademarks are region by region but we could do Americas and EU for about $15K if I remember correctly. I think for a project as important as this... it's worth considering. It can take several years to process, i'm not 100% if the GSF trademark is now fully live in all countries.

[seanmcilroy29]

@jawache I'll consult with a Trademark specialist regarding this, along with obtaining updated costings and timelines.