Trademark Policy

Why a licence project needs a trademark at all

A licence is a promise a stranger relies on without reading it. Somebody sees ORL 1.1 on a repository and forms an expectation about what they may do. That expectation is only safe if the words behind those characters are always the same words.

If anyone could publish an altered text and still call it ORL, the name would carry no information and every adopter would be back to reading a bespoke contract. Apache, Creative Commons, and the Business Source License all reached the same conclusion and all protect their names for the same reason. Free text, protected name.

The marks

The following are marks of the OpenRoots project.

• OpenRoots, in any capitalisation or spacing, including Open Roots and openroots
• ORL, and OpenRoots License
• ORD, and OpenRoots Data License
• ORM, and OpenRoots Model License
• ORA, and OpenRoots Agent License
• Root, Canopy, and Compute, used together as a licence tier system
• The OpenRoots wordmark, badges, and licence buttons

What you may do without asking

• Release your own work under any OpenRoots licence, for any purpose, commercial or not, at any scope.
• State truthfully that your work is licensed under it, for example licensed under the OpenRoots License 2.0.
• Use our badges on work that genuinely carries the licence they name.
• Reproduce a licence text in full and unmodified, in a repository, documentation, a book, a course, or a legal filing.
• Refer to us by name in commentary, criticism, comparison, teaching, or news. You do not need permission to disagree with us in public.
• Say your product is compatible with or built on OpenRoots licensed work, where that is actually true.

What you may not do

• Rename a different text. Change a clause and the result is your licence and needs your name.
• Imply endorsement. Adopting a licence is not an endorsement, a certification, an approval, or a membership.
• Name a product after us. No company name, product name, domain, subdomain, handle, or app title built on our marks.
• Alter the marks. No recolouring, restretching, redrawing, or merging our wordmark into your own logo.
• Badge work that is not licensed. That is a false statement about somebody's legal rights and it is the misuse we act on fastest.

Forks, said plainly

You are free to fork the text. Copyright in the licence text is not the tool we use to stop you, and we would rather the ideas spread than sit still.

What a fork must do is stand on its own name. Call it what you like, state that it is based on an OpenRoots licence if you wish, and make sure a reader can tell in one glance that it is not ours. Section 0 of every instrument says the same thing in the licence itself.

Enforcement, and why it is not optional

Trademark rights can weaken through abandonment, uncontrolled licensing, or failure to preserve a mark's source-identifying function. Enforcement is therefore focused on uses that make altered text or unrelated work look official, not on suppressing criticism or truthful reference.

In practice we start with a note asking for a correction, because almost every case is an honest mistake and ends there. Formal action is reserved for false badging and for altered texts published under our name, since those two directly mislead the people the licence exists to protect.