RIM Changes BBX to BlackBerry 10 Amidst Legal Battle

Research in Motion has changed the name of its BBX operating system to BlackBerry 10 after losing a legal fight with a New Mexico-based company that claimed ownership of the BBX name.

"BlackBerry 10 is the official name of the next generation platform that will power future BlackBerry smartphones," RIM tweeted via its @BlackBerryDev feed.

RIM unveiled BBX at October's San Francisco DevCon conference. It combined the company's RIM BlackBerry 7 OS and the QNX OS from the PlayBook, and RIM said will be the OS of choice on its smartphones, mobile devices, and embedded systems.

Days later, however, BASIS International issued a cease-and-desist letter, arguing that it had "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."

BASIS later requested a temporary restraining order, asking the court to ban RIM from using the BBX name at its Asia DevCon conference in Singapore this week. The court granted that request yesterday, prompting the BlackBerry 10 name change.

"The BBX mark is identical to the mark which RIM is allegedly using to present its BBX product," an Albuquerque federal court said in its decision, according to BASIS. "Despite the fact that the two companies are not direct competitors, the parties' respective products are highly related and target the same class of consumers, that is, business application software developers."

If RIM were to use BBX, consumers might "wrongly believe that the software applications created using BASIS's development tools are only compatible with RIM's BBX operating system," the court said.

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