BlackBerry's new BBX name might have started legal problems for RIM

Sometimes it seems that lawyers are the only ones making money in this economy-outside of Apple, that is. Earlier this week at DevCon, BlackBerry announced the new BBX name it is giving its one-size-fits-all QNX flavored OS for smartphones and tablets. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone at RIM didn't check to make sure that their would be no problems using that name. A small company called BASIS International has a cross-platform developers language called BBx which allows app developers to write a program once and have it run on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

BASIS International in a release vowed to defend its trademark which was first used in 1985 as Business BASIS eXtended (BBx). For its part, RIM doesn't appear to be worried. In a release, the Canadian company said that they have not received the legal complaint that BASIS talked about in its press release. RIM says that since both companies are in different lines of business, it doesn't see where there could be any confusion. BASIS sees it differently. BASIS chairman and CEO Nico Spence said, "We have thousands of product licenses installed worldwide with the ‘BBX’ prefix that run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other proprietary UNIX OSs from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and SUN, with mobile clients running Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Mobile. We are fielding numerous customer inquiries voicing their confusion about the RIM announcement.” Spence adds that ironically, BASIS' BBx could help RIM grab a bigger share of the online application market since the program allows apps written for iOS and Android to also work on BlackBerry devices.