All your open source belong to us...so there!

The bloggy folks OSM have decided it's time to confront the allegations that they stole the name 'Open Source Media' by pointing out that they're only tradmarking the letter combination 'OSM' and not the phrase 'Open Source Media', which is merely "a description of what we are and do, not a trade name".

End of story. Except, it isn't:

For one, the acronym OSM is shared by:
- the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal
- the Office of Surface Mining
- Oregon Steel Mills, Inc.
- Orient Ship Management
- OSM Component Development Strategies
- Open Source Matters
- the Office of Spectrum Management
- Open Systems Management
- and Offshore Software Management

all of whom presumably have a stake in 'OSM'. And that's only the first page of Google results...

It will be interesting to know what they think of a bunch of upstart bloggers coming along and trademarking their initials. Somebody should contact them.

The second point to make is that PJM/OSM don't address the crucial question of just what is so open source about their media. As every fool knoweth, open source is a pretty well-defined term. As far as we can tell from here, it described neither who OSM are nor what they do.