OpenSSH - Trademark

Trademark

In February 2001, Tatu Ylönen, Chairman and CTO of SSH Communications Security informed the OpenSSH development mailing list, that after speaking with key OpenSSH developers Markus Friedl, Theo de Raadt, and Niels Provos, the company would be asserting its ownership of the "SSH" and "Secure Shell" trademarks. Ylönen commented that the trademark "is a significant asset ... SSH Communications Security has made a substantial investment in time and money in its SSH mark" and sought to change references to the protocol to "SecSH" or "secsh", in order to maintain control of the "SSH" name. He proposed that OpenSSH change its name in order to avoid a lawsuit, a suggestion that developers resisted. OpenSSH developer Damien Miller replied that "SSH has been a generic term to describe the protocol well before your attempt to trademark it" and urged Ylönen to reconsider, commenting: "I think that the antipathy generated by pursuing a free software project will cost your company a lot more than a trademark."

At the time, "SSH," "Secure Shell" and "ssh" had appeared in documents proposing the protocol as an open standard and it was hypothesised that by doing so, without marking these within the proposal as registered trademarks, Ylönen was relinquishing all exclusive rights to the name as a means of describing the protocol. Improper use of a trademark, or allowing others to use a trademark incorrectly, results in the trademark becoming a generic term, like Kleenex or Aspirin, which opens the mark to use by others. After study of the USPTO trademark database, many online pundits opined that the term "ssh" was not trademarked, merely the logo using the lower case letters "ssh." In addition, the six years between the company's creation and the time when it began to defend its trademark, and that only OpenSSH was receiving threats of legal repercussions, weighed against the trademark's validity.

Both developers of OpenSSH and Ylönen himself were members of the IETF working group developing the new standard; after several meetings this group denied Ylönen's request to rename the protocol, citing concerns that it would set a bad precedent for other trademark claims against the IETF. The participants argued that both "Secure Shell" and "SSH" were generic terms and could not be trademarks.