I wasn't speaking of the trademark, you don't need a trademark to publish and promote a public definition of a term. Misusing that term doesn't have legal conse

I wasn't speaking of the trademark, you don't need a trademark to publish and promote a public definition of a term. Misusing that term doesn't have legal consequences but it won't stop people from getting upset at you for misleading them, e.g. your customers getting miffed when they learn the "open source" option you provide actually means they can't do anything with the source at all that they would expect to be able to do with the popular Apache/MIT/GPL/BSD options. (Correct me if I'm mistaken, but just those 4 licenses seem to be used for the vast majority of open source now)