RIM May Have to Rename BBX
Software maker Basis said it already has "taken swift legal action" to protect its "BBx" trademark. "Research In Motion’s press release announcing a new Blackberry operating system named "BBX" is causing great confusion for the worldwide Basis community and could potentially harm Basis’ reputation for enabling cross-platform application development," a Basis press release states.
Basis CEO Nico Spence said that there is an installed base of "thousands" of Basis products that use the BBx prefix. "Ironically, Basis’ BBx may aid RIM in its quest to grab a share of the application market for mobile devices in that any application created with Basis’ BBx for the Android or iOS mobile devices will also run on BlackBerry products."
However, Basis does not offer a product that is called "BBx", but uses the "x" to signify a generalization of the platform in a similar this letter is used to describe a range of version number in software such as "Firefox 3.x". Basis current BBx version is "BBj". BBj is an object-oriented development environment for Oracle's Java Virtual Machine.
Still, it seems reasonable to be concerned about RIM BBX, even if we know that Basis is riding the wave and will not only see damage at this point, but an opportunity to give its software exposure it otherwise would not have.
Basis people know what basis is. I used basis before, and its like basic on steroids, kind of slow too. (kind of like how there was visual basic for doc, well heir system usually runs on terminals and telnet, so its not graphics based.) (Visual basic for dos used ascii to mimic windows) (Basis is more on the buisness side of things, so its mostly text based)
I'm a retired systems Analyst who worked on BBx from version 2.x through to 5.x before I retired.
BBx was based on an older Business Basis created by a company called MAI. I'm not even sure if MAI is still around but they also had a product called BBM that they trademarked which was a version of their language designed to run on their custom built PCs back in to Windows 3.x days.
If a trademark is granted and is kept up to date then no one, even Microsoft, Apple, or RIM can use it without legal repercussions. If MAI was still around then RIM could be sued for their use of the BBM trademark as well. Both MAI & Basis predate the formation of Research in Motion.
We are upset because when we go up against SAP we certainly don't want our competitors stating that our software was written on a cheap Blackberry OS. Can you hear the laughter in the room. This would seriously damage or kill our company.
For those of you who are not familiar with the product, Business Basic was written by Basic Four back in 1971. The company was later renamed to MAI/ Basic Four. They had products called, BB, BBI, BBII, BBM, GPX, SPX, MPX, BOSS, etc. Employees of this company left and created BBx back in 1985. Since then, it has dominated the BB programming environment. They have millions of users, including customers like Citibank. In the back office environment, BBx dominates this world. BBx is well known to be the fastest programming environment in the world. I can clearly understand why RIM wants the mark. RIM would clearly be enriched by the use of the infringed mark. There was complete confusion in the Basis BBx world.
As for trademarks, Basis has used the mark since 1985 and gain uncontestable status of the mark in 1995 (Category #8 - software). Under USC Title 17 law, Basis is the only company that can use the mark, "BBX" with any product in the software world. Basis has the right to seek and be granted reasonable attorney fees, court cost, and damages if RIM does not cease and desist using the mark by October 31, 2011.
This case is a slam dunk for Basis.