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.