Wasmer and Trademarks (extended)

I’m Syrus, founder and CEO of Wasmer.

In our latest Hacker News announcement, there were some comments and understandable concerns about the fact we, Wasmer, attempted to trademark the name of a non-profit organization, specifically WebAssembly. There are only some incomplete clues as to what Wasmer’s motivations were, so it is ample time we made a more formal and complete public account.

We intentionally decided to wait some time to portray the situation, so that the conversation remains productive for Wasmer and the WebAssembly ecosystem. We now believe is a good time to share the story.

Let’s start from the beginning. Why apply for any trademark at all?

Background

Not long after I created Wasmer in December 2018, a non-profit organization called Bytecode Alliance came into being.

WebAssembly's beauty is that it has consensus buy-in from all the major browser vendors. In the often rocky history of software and its vendors, Wasm’s broad acceptance is a monumental and inspiring success.

Wasmer applied to become part of that non-profit. But we were unofficially rejected on November 12th 2019 (the date is key if you wish to trace future events) by written communication from one of the Bytecode Alliance's co-chairs to one of Wasmer's investors. And it is this singular event that begins to explain the next steps we took.

The WebAssembly Foundation

Soon after, I started planning to form another WebAssembly Alliance, one that could help propel other companies and projects with similar visions to ours. I began contacting entities such as the CNCF, amongst others, to discuss creating a non-profit foundation of broader scope, I thought to call it: The WebAssembly Foundation.

I had always intended for the Wasmer runtime to be a part of a shared foundation effort between companies. And had registered the webassembly.foundation domain in 2018, before both Wasmer was even a company and the Bytecode Alliance existed. Also, you can see that the Wasmer runtime repo was redirected from the WAFoundation Github organization at that time: https://web.archive.org/web/20181230031716/https://github.com/wafoundation/wasmer

Once I had talked to enough supportive entities, I begin engaging with specialized lawyers to form the foundation. Simply because “WebAssembly” is part of the name “WebAssembly Foundation”, an attempt was made to register a trademark for “WebAssembly”. The intent was not to kidnap the name, nor to aggressively prevent its usage, but solely to create the foundation.

The lawyers eventually began the process of creating the foundation. But for other reasons, including other company priorities, I decided it was too early to create a foundation, and we decided not to sign the engagement letter with them. I wrongly assumed the foundation and trademark process had halted.

A few months later, on July 13th, 2020 I received this message on Twitter from a member of the W3C:

As soon as I received that message I contacted the lawyers and realized that:

1. The trademark process had progressed despite not signing the agreement with them.
2. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) refused the initial application requesting more information to pursue the WebAssembly trademark.

All this meant that we were still on the period where we could decide if we wanted to further pursue the trademarks or formally abandon them.

We decided to left the process to expire, leading to this official response from USPTO in September of the same year: https://uspto.report/TM/88703780 “Status: Abandoned because the applicant failed to respond”.

End note

Our vision for the future of WebAssembly and Edge Computing remains intact, and whether driven by an alliance of today or a foundation of the future we are very excited about what's coming next.

Technology is just a means to an end, product is always the ultimate value add. And with that vision, we plan to empower developers and enterprises in the future of computing, whether centralized (Cloud Computing), mixed (Edge Computing) or completely decentralized (Web3) their computing is.

We want to hear from you about your projects and ideas for enabling truly universal computing, running safely and quickly on any platform.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at team@wasmer.io