Following BlackBerry holding company Research In Motion’s (RIM) announcement of its next generation BlackBerry BBX platform, Basis International has announced that it is taking legal action against the company to protect its ownership of the “BBx trademarked operating system independent language, database, and toolset.”

The software company stated that RIM’s press release announcing a new BlackBerry operating system (OS) named “BBX” is causing great confusion for the worldwide Basis community and could potentially harm its reputation for enabling cross-platform application development.

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.”

The company stated that its latest generation of BBx, BBj, is an OS-agnostic language that runs on numerous operating system, Java platforms, as well as JavaScript-enabled browsers and is not limited to just BlackBerry cellphones and tablets powered by RIM’s “BBX.”

Spence added: “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.”

According to the CrackBerry.com tech blog, RIM issued the following statement in response to Basis’ claims: “RIM has not yet received a copy of the legal complaint described in Basis International’s press release, but we do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business.”

 

In other RIM related news the Canadian tablet and smartphone maker might also be sued by law firms in the US and Canada, which were affected by the service failures experienced by BlackBerry users earlier this month.