Earlier this month, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) published a post outlining a dispute with Synadia, the original sponsor of the NATS project. The short version:

• In March 2018, NATS entered CNCF incubation with Synadia committing in writing to transfer the trademark.
• CNCF provided legal support to resolve an unrelated dispute and even reimbursed Synadia’s legal costs.
• The trademark transfer never happened.
• Seven years later, Synadia is asserting ownership and proposing to move the project out of CNCF governance under a different licensing model.

At first glance, this looks like a simple project governance breakdown.
It’s not.
It’s a warning.

Signal of a Broader Governance Gap

Trademark ownership is not a bureaucratic detail.
It’s the legal foundation of neutral open source governance.

It protects the project’s identity against unilateral corporate control.
It ensures governance stability even when maintainers change.
It provides legal certainty for developers, contributors, and adopters.

Yet today, the footer on the NATS website still states:

“NATS is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project.”
“The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks.”

Given CNCF’s own disclosure, these statements are misleading.
The promised trademark transfer never happened.
This created a false sense of security for both contributors and end users, who reasonably believed they were participating in a vendor-neutral, foundation-governed project backed by the legal protections such status implies.

For seven years, the community operated under the assumption that core legal protections were in place.
They were not.

Which raises a larger and more uncomfortable question:

How many other projects under the Linux Foundation umbrella are operating on similarly incomplete foundations?

No Mention of a Trademark Audit (Yet)

As of this writing, I haven’t seen any mention of a comprehensive audit of trademark ownership across Linux Foundation–hosted projects.
If such a review is already in motion, I’d be glad to hear it — and genuinely hope that’s the case.

But in the absence of a public statement or visible plan, there appears to be no system-wide review, no centralized tracking of trademark status, and no retroactive verification even after projects reach graduation.

The risk wasn’t widely acknowledged.
And it certainly wasn’t being managed.

It was invisible.

Why This Matters

The Linux Foundation has been the engine behind the professionalization of open source: providing legal frameworks, operational models, and scalable governance.

But those systems rely on one thing: rigor.

You cannot assume trademark protections exist.
You must verify them.

When foundational assets like trademarks aren’t secured, the entire promise of neutral governance — and the ecosystem built on it — becomes vulnerable.

In today’s environment of heightened sensitivity to software supply chain risks, open source compliance, and legal provenance, this is not a minor oversight.
It’s a material governance failure.

What Should Happen Next

The corrective action is clear:

• Audit all hosted Linux Foundation projects for trademark ownership status.
• Confirm that trademarks are properly transferred or licensed to LF or its sub-foundations.
• Publicly disclose any incomplete assignments or disputes.
• Update project public materials to reflect reality.
• Establish regular, transparent audit cadences moving forward.

This isn’t punitive.
It’s operational hygiene.

Open source is fundamentally a system of trust: trust in code, trust in governance, trust in institutions.

The NATS dispute is a canary in the coal mine.
The time to act is before more foundations crack.

Seven years of silence over a missing trademark isn’t a glitch. It’s a warning.

Up here above the 49th Parallel in glorious Canada, we are grateful for our shero Dr. Bonnie F*king Henry who helped us flatten the curve so we could safely (we hope) celebrate our Canada Day 2 days ago on the First of July with masks and socially distanced parades.

While the USA takes a day off to contemplate how to make america great again, I am taking the downtime to track down and clean up all of the breadcrumbs of my virtual life.

Over the years, I’ve signed up for what feels like a bazillion social platforms, posted once or twice or sometimes only creating a now long out of date profile so I could comment or interact on the platform — like my Medium profile below.

Then there’s my Linkedin profile with a picture that I keep up because it’s the one my Mother loves and has on her refrigerator of me. She still is hopeful that some days I actually still put on earrings, a suit and a touch of blush instead of the hoodies and tee shirts that I’ve collected as conference swag over the years.

I also love it that when some unknowing event organizer invites me to grace their stage thinking they’re getting the corporatized 10 years younger version and instead I show up as my butched-out velvet-jacketed middle-aged dyke self.

The closest to today’s reality is my Twitter self, caught in action on stage at some random tech event , conference badge hung around my neck with the de rigueur black tee shirt most likely emblazoned with the logo of my current employer-backed initiative.

Then there’s my github presence which semi-accurately points you to the current projects I’m working on but really doesn’t reflect all the #CloudNative projects that I’m involved in at the moment as it only covers ‘ contributions’ in the form of pull requests and code. Please, don’t get me going on the Myth of Meritocracy — let’s save that for another post.

But those are the 4 easy ones to find. As I start chasing down memory lane for other social platforms that I’ve signed up for and abandoned, the resemblence to my current self takes on some strange better forgotten twists. Like Tumblr, which I loved for awhile then sporadically post random things like this picture of Rick Santorim and Russian agent Maria Butina.

Though when I follow the breadcrumbs I left for myself from tumblr to my Instagram self, the memories that show up on Instagram are much more interesting but still quite stale. (I do like the hat better though).

Google searches really produce some very jet-lagged versions of myself with wide assortment of haircuts especially on sched.org that ‘keeps’ a history of your profile pic at the time of the event just for giggles even when you update your profile. I’d forgotten about those glasses completely and (oh my) that haircut.

Or the oh-so-serious look on Slideshare in which I look like I wanted to run off and join the circus for real back in 2016.

And does anyone still use About.me? I appear to have decided it was best to just link straight out to my corporate video podcast channel and leave it be for now..

Speaking of Youtube, don’t go there if you don’t have alot of time on your hands as there are the 300+ video podcasts I’ve recorded from hotel rooms, kitchen tables, and drop-in office pods all in various haircuts, states of jetlag and backdrops. Someday I’ll do a montage of all the best of the bedhead sleepy time-zone challenged versions of myself. But for now, here’s the latest video podcast with breadcrumbs from my kitchen table to the rest of the @OpenShift Common shows

So you think you know me now?

The bane of updating my virtual existence on the internet is what I call the “Multiple Personalities Effect”. Early on in my online social career, I started creating separate twitter accounts for all of my areas of interest as I use twitter more as a bookmarking service than for self-promotion. I also figured that the people that I worked for didn’t need to know about all my side-gigs or past lives and some of my opinions didn’t need to surface in my work life/balancing act. I once argued that this was a more healthy way to be on twitter (I no longer believe this to be true).

Prior to my current incantation as a #CloudNative, I spent some quality time as a Pythonista at some cool start-ups in Vancouver which garnered me my Twitter handle @PythonDJ. I was a prisoner inside of an XML Standards world for a period of time as @XBRLSpy, made an attempt at being an iphone app developer @DiscoverTotems. I continue to live and breathe as a local Maker under the moniker @GetMakered. I went to #SWSX once and got inspired to start up a VR habit as @VirtualDragShow…and I am sure there are many more abandoned profiles on both twitter and a myriad of other platforms.

If you find them, DM me @PythonDJ and I’ll continue the virtual clean-up process. Then someday, I’ll circle back to this post and clean it up too.