Recently, PC World published an opinion piece on why trademarks are bad for open source. The position ruffled the feathers of openSUSE Community manager, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, who believes that “far from harmful, trademarks help protect smaller projects from abuse by big companies, and protect the investment made by larger companies that might otherwise be skittish about opening up their code under FOSS licenses.”
Zonker's argument is founded on the Four Freedoms outlined by the Free Software Foundation which have nothing to do with the ability to commercially profit from open source software.
Want to know more? Go here to read his full response.
