Legal Team Recognized for their Work Protecting Trademarks of 1000+ Open Source Projects and Communities
SAN FRANCISCO, April 24, 2025 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open collaboration, has been named as a finalist for the 2025 WTR Industry Awards, an annual program presented by World Trademark Review (WTR) recognizing the world's leading in-house trademark teams and individuals. Daniel Scales, Chief Brand Counsel at the Linux Foundation, is also named as one of the WTR 300: The World's Leading Corporate Trademark Professionals for his excellence in leading LF's trademark team to support, build up, and safeguard open source communities around the world.
Legal Team Recognized for their Work Protecting Trademarks of 1000+ Open Source Projects and Communities
The Linux Foundation's legal team provides crucial trademark guidance and protection for more than 1000 open source projects and communities, managing a complex and diverse portfolio of over 1900 trademark registrations and applications across global jurisdictions. This includes helping defend open source projects against trademark squatters, providing guidance to projects navigating license changes, managing forks, and operating conformance and certification programs that ensure brand consistency, trust, and integrity for users and downstream adopters of open source technologies.
The trademark support complements the LF's other intellectual property support for its members and project communities, such as the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, an initiative that helps identify prior art to defend against claims by patent trolls or license management and scanning innovations. LF legal teams also worked alongside Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) in 2024 to bring down a phishing operation that fraudulently leveraged a Linux Foundation open source project's logo and name.
"Trademarks are vital to the long-term sustainability and security of open source," said Scales. "We're proud to support open source communities by protecting their project identities and helping ensure that standards remain open and trustworthy. The WTR's shortlist recognition of the Linux Foundation reflects the critical, but often unseen, work our team performs to safeguard these shared community assets."
The Linux Foundation's trademark strategy also plays a role in enhancing security and reducing supply chain risk. By enforcing proper usage of project trademarks, the Linux Foundation helps downstream users distinguish between genuine distributions of open source software and software from unknown origins—an increasingly important priority for governments and enterprises around the world.
"This recognition underscores the unique legal challenges that come with stewarding thousands of global open source software and open standards projects," said Mike Dolan, SVP and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. "Our legal team works with an incredibly diverse set of communities to ensure trademarks are not only protected, but also serve as an enabler of trust, innovation, and security throughout the open source software supply chain."
The winners of the 2025 WTR Industry Awards will be announced during the International Trademark Association (INTA) Annual Meeting in San Diego in May.
To learn more about the Linux Foundation, please visit: www.linuxfoundation.org.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, LF Decentralized Trust, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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